Alex Kääpä Wuppertal

Super-Preshowers(pdf)

Based on the current data from the Pierre Auger Observatory, no evidence of cosmic ray photon primaries has been found. However, photon primaries could induce so-called “super-preshowers”, which have not been considered sofar, but are a promising candidate for explaining the “composition puzzle” at ultra-high energies. In this presentation, possible super-preshower processes are introduced, and the effects of super-preshowers on important reconstructed shower parameters, such as the energy deposit and muon production, are studied via simulations for the case of the Pierre Auger Observatory.