Extensive air showers

Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays carry information about their sources and the intervening medium apart from providing a beam of particles for studying certain features of high energy interactions currently inaccessible at man-made accelerators. They can at present be studied only via the extensive air showers (EAS's) they generate while passing through the Earth's atmosphere, since their fluxes are too low for the experiments of limited capability flown in balloons and satellites. The EAS is generated by a series of interactions of the primary cosmic ray and its progeny with the atmospheric nucle