Analysis of NA61/SHINE data for improved understanding of Extensive Air Showers

This report is a summary of a project I worked on as a summer student at CERN during June-September of 2021. The purpose of this research project was to analyse data taken with the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN SPS using Rivet, to examine are there discrepancies between data and hadronic interaction models and to determine whether these discrepancies are smaller then in analyses done before. Since the last stages of particle cascades initiated by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are important for the number of muons measured at ground level and because the most numerous projectiles in air showers are $\pi^{-}$ mesons, the results from $\pi^{-}+ C$ collisions at two beam energies 158 GeV/c and 350 GeV/c are regarded