High Energy Hadron-Nucleus Cross Sections and Their Extrapolation to Cosmic Ray Energies

Abstract

Old models of the scattering of composite systems based on the Glauber model of multiple diffraction are applied to hadron-nucleus scattering. We obtain an excellent fit with only two free parameters to the highest energy hadron-nucleus data available. Because of the quality of the fit and the simplicity of the model it is argued that it should continue to be reliable up to the highest cosmic ray energies. Logarithmic extrapolations of proton-proton and proton-antiproton data are used to calculate the proton-air cross sections at very high energy. Finally, it is observed that if the exponential behavior of the proton-antiproton diffraction peak continues into the few TeV energy range it will violate partial wave unitarity. We propose a simple modification that will guarantee unitarity throughout the cosmic ray energy region.