Through the Looking-Glass with ALICE into the Quark-Gluon Plasma: A New Test for Hadronic Interaction Models Used in Air Shower Simulations

Abstract Recently, the ALICE Collaboration reported an enhancement of the yield ratio of strange and multi-strange hadrons to charged pions as a function of multiplicity at mid-rapidity in proton-proton, proton-lead, lead-lead, and xenon-xenon scattering. ALICE observations provide a strong indication that a quark-gluon plasma is partly formed in high multiplicity events of both small and large colliding systems. Motivated by ALICE's results, we propose a new test for hadronic interaction models used for analyzing ultra-high-energy-cosmic-ray (UHECR) collisions with air nuclei. The test is grounded in the almost equal column-energy density in UHECR-air collisions and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. We applied the test to post-LHC event generators describing hadronic phenomena of UHECR scattering and show that these QCD Monte Carlo-based codes must be retuned to accommodate the strangeness enhancement relative to pions observed in LHC data.