Influence of diffractive interactions on cosmic ray air showers

A comparative study of commonly used hadronic collision simulation packages is presented. The characteristics of the products of hadron-nucleus collisions are analyzed from a general perspective, but focusing on their correlation with diffractive processes. One of the purposes of our work is to give quantitative estimations of the impact that different characteristics of the hadronic models have on air shower observables. Several sets of shower simulations using different settings for the parameters controlling the diffractive processes are used to analyze the correlations between diffractivity and shower observables. We find that the relative probability of diffractive processes during the shower development have a non negligible influence over the longitudinal profile as well as the distribution of muons at ground level. The implications on experimental data analysis are discussed.