Baryon stopping in high energy collisions and the extrapolation of hadron production models to Cosmic Ray energies

A new striking feature of hadron production in nuclear collisions is thelarge stopping of the participating nucleons in hadron-nucleus andnucleus-nucleus collisions. This enhanced baryon stopping can be understoodintroducing new diquark breaking mechanisms in multistring models of hadronproduction. Here we show, that similar diquark breaking mechanisms occur athigh energy even in hadron-hadron collisions. This effect leads to significantchanges in the extrapolation of these models to Cosmic Ray energies.