The mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is important for understanding their origin. Owing to our limited knowledge of the hadronic interaction, the interpretations of the mass composition from observations include several open problems, such as the inconsistent interpretations of $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}\rangle $ and $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}^{\mu}\rangle $. Furthermore, a large difference between the predictions exists in the hadronic interaction models. Diffractive collision is one of the proposed sources of the uncertainty. In this paper, we discuss the effect of the detailed characteristics of diffractive collisions on the observables of ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray experiments, focusing on three detailed characteristics. These are the cross-sectional fractions of different collision types, the diffractive-mass spectrum, and diffractive-mass-dependent particle production from the diffractive dissociation system. We demonstrate that the current level of uncertainty in the cross-sectional fraction can affect $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}\rangle $ by 8.9 $\mathrm{g/cm^2}$ and $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}^{\mu}\rangle $ by 9.4 $\mathrm{g/cm^2}$, whereas the other details of diffractive collisions exhibit relatively minor effects.

中文翻译：

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超高能宇宙线实验衍射碰撞对可观测物预测影响的模拟研究

超高能宇宙射线的质量组成对于了解它们的起源很重要。由于我们对强子相互作用的了解有限，观测质量组成的解释包括几个开放性问题，例如 $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}\rangle $ 和 $\langle X_{\数学{最大}}^{\mu}\rangle $。此外，强子相互作用模型中的预测存在很大差异。衍射碰撞是提出的不确定性来源之一。在本文中，我们讨论了衍射碰撞的细节特征对超高能宇宙线实验可观测的影响，重点关注三个细节特征。这些是不同碰撞类型的横截面分数，衍射质谱，以及来自衍射解离系统的衍射质量依赖性粒子产生。我们证明了横截面分数的当前不确定性水平可以影响 $\langle X_{\mathrm{max}}\rangle $ 8.9 $\mathrm{g/cm^2}$ 和 $\langle X_{\ mathrm{max}}^{\mu}\rangle $ 9.4 $\mathrm{g/cm^2}$，而衍射碰撞的其他细节表现出相对较小的影响。