New physics searches from cosmic-ray air-showers

Zusammenfassung

This thesis deals with the study of possible production and detection of new fundamental particles, created in atmospheric showers from the collision of cosmic-rays with the upper layers of our atmosphere. We will distinguish two broad categories for the particles that could be searched in terrestrial experiments; long-lived particles and stable particles. In the first case, we consider particles with a large enough lifetime that could propagate through the atmosphere, and penetrate underground to decay inside the instrumented volume of large neutrino detectors. On the other hand, we consider stable particles that could scatter on the target material of underground experiments, leaving a detectable signal. The models considered in this thesis are motivated by both, theoretical puzzles, and experimental evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.