Ultra high energy cosmic rays versus models of high energy hadronic interactions

Abstract We evaluate the consistency of hadronic interaction models in the CORSIKA simulation package with publicly available fluorescence telescope data from the Pierre Auger Observatory. By comparing the first few central moments of the extensive air shower depth maximum distributions, as extracted from measured events, to those predicted by the best-fit inferred compositions, we derive a statistical measure of the consistency of a given hadronic model with data. To mitigate possible systematic biases, we include all primaries up to iron, compensate for the differences between the measured and simulated energy spectra of cosmic rays and account for other known systematic effects. Additionally, we study the effects of including higher central moments in the fit and project our results to larger statistics.