The strong interaction at the collider and cosmic-rays frontiers

Understand

First data on inclusive particle production measured in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are compared to predictions of various hadron-interaction Monte Carlos (QGSJET, EPOS and SIBYLL) used commonly in high-energy cosmic-ray physics.

• While reasonable overall agreement is found for some of the models, none of them reproduces consistently the sqrt(s) evolution of all the measured observables.
• We discuss the implications of the new LHC data for the modeling of the non-perturbative and semihard parton dynamics in hadron-hadron and cosmic-rays interactions at the highest energies studied today.