One-dimensional hybrid approach to extensive air shower simulation

An efficient scheme for one-dimensional extensive air shower simulation and its implementation in the program CONEX are presented. Explicit Monte Carlo simulation of the high-energy part of hadronic and electro-magnetic cascades in the atmosphere is combined with a numeric solution of cascade equations for smaller energy sub-showers to obtain accurate shower predictions. The developed scheme allows us to calculate not only observables related to the number of particles (shower size) but also ionization energy deposit profiles which are needed for the interpretation of data of experiments employing the fluorescence light technique. We discuss in detail the basic algorithms developed and illustrate the power of the method. It is shown that Monte Carlo, numerical, and hybrid air shower calculations give consistent results which agree very well with those obtained within the CORSIKA program. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.