Trends in the energy dependence of strong interaction characteristics at ultra-high energies

Abstract

The trends in the energy dependence of strong interaction characteristics that reveal themselves when an attempt is made to bring about a closer agreement between experimentally observed size dependence of several properties of high energy hadrons in air showers and the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations are discussed. The discussion shows the need for an increase in the inelasticity and interaction cross section of both pions and nucleons at ultra-high energies, as also an increase in the cross section for the production of nucleon-antinucleon pairs and also the need for postulating a process similar to the gammaization process of Nikolsky according to which a considerable fraction of energy is transferred to the soft component by-passing the normal pionization.