Interpretation of EAS measurements strongly depends on detailed air shower simulations. The uncertainty in the prediction of shower observables for different primary particles and energies is currently dominated by differences between hadronic interaction models. The new models QGSJET II-3 and EPOS 1.6, which reproduce all major results of existing accelerator data (including detailed data of R...

The Radar Echo Telescope for Cosmic Rays (RET-CR) is a recently initiated experiment designed to detect the englacial cascade of cosmic-ray air shower via in-ice radar, toward goal full-scale, next-generation ultra high energy neutrinos in polar ice. For cosmic rays with primary greater than 10 PeV, roughly 10% an air-shower's reaches surface elevation ice-sheet ($\gtrsim$2 km) concentrated int...

The long-standing mainstay of support for C. T. R. Wilson’s global circuit hypothesis is the similarity between the diurnal variation of thunderstorm days in universal time and the Carnegie curve of electrical potential gradient. This rough agreement has sustained the widespread view that thunderstorms are the ‘‘batteries’’ for the global electrical circuit. This study utilizes 10 years of Trop...

Context. The detection of radio pulses from cosmic ray air showers is a potentially powerful new detection mechanism for studying spectrum and composition of ultra high energy cosmic rays that needs to be understood in greater detail. The radiation consists in large part of geosynchrotron radiation. The intensity of this radiation depends, among other factors, on the energy of the primary parti...

The experimental technique of fluorescence light observation is used in current and planned air shower experiments that aim at understanding the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. In the fluorescence technique, the geometry of the shower is reconstructed from the correlation between arrival time and incident angle of the signals detected by the telescope. The calculation of the expected li...

Households provide environments that encourage the formation of microbial communities, often as biofilms. Such biofilms constitute potential reservoirs for pathogens, particularly for immune-compromised individuals. One household environment that potentially accumulates microbial biofilms is that provided by vinyl shower curtains. Over time, vinyl shower curtains accumulate films, commonly refe...

We make a thorough comparison between different schemes of merging fixedorder tree-level matrix element generators with parton-shower models. We use the most basic benchmark of the O(αS) correction to ee → jets, where the simple kinematics allows us to study in detail the transition between the matrix-element and parton-shower regions. We find that the CKKW-based schemes give a reasonably smoot...

We present simulations performed with REAS2, a new Monte Carlo code for the calculation of geosynchrotron radio emission from extensive air showers. The code uses thoroughly tested time-domain radio emission routines in conjunction with a realistic air shower model based on per-shower multi-dimensional CORSIKA-generated histograms. We assess in detail how the transition from simpler, parametris...

The globular cluster (GC) nature of the recently catalogued candidate FSR 1767 is established in the present work. It results as the closest GC so far detected in the Galaxy. The nature of this object is investigated by means of 2MASS colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), the stellar radial density profile (RDP) and proper-motions (PM). The properties are consistent with an intermediate metallicity...