J. Bellandi et al., DIFFRACTIVE CONTRIBUTION TO THE ELASTICITY AND TO THE NUCLEONIC FLUX IN THE ATMOSPHERE, Journal of physics. G, Nuclear and particle physics, 23(1), 1997, pp. 125-134
We perform an analysis of the nucleonic and hadronic fluxes in the atm
osphere by considering two components for the nucleon scattering, name
ly non-diffractive and diffractive interactions. It is shown that, alb
eit small, the diffractive component is really necessary to get good a
greement with data An analysis of the proton-proton total cross sectio
n and proton-air inelastic cross section, both extracted from cosmic-r
ay data, is also presented.