Uncertanties in Air-showers from Small-x pQCD Mini-Jets

Abstract

To investigate uncertainties in air shower simulations caused by the small-x regime, a model including leading-twist hard pQCD plus soft processes was built, which are separated by an energy dependent transverse momentum cut-off. We provide a fit of the cut-off to the total pp cross section for different PDFs using the eikonal formalism and show that for modern PDF sets there is only a small uncertainty in the mini-jet cross section, and hence in the final-state multiplicity and the number of produced muons.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, contribution to QM2005 proceedings, revised version after referee comment