Influence of microscopic particle interaction models on the flux of atmospheric antiprotons

We study the effect of particle interaction models on the theoretical estimates of atmospheric antiproton flux by comparing the BESS observations of antiproton spectra with the spectra obtained by means of a full three dimensional Monte Carlo simulation program. For such a purpose, we use two popular microscopic interaction models, namely FLUKA and UrQMD, to simulate antiproton spectra at multiple observation levels. In this article, we further compare the atmospheric antiproton fluxes predicted by a few popular microscopic high energy particle interaction models with each other to get an idea about the influence of such models at energies beyond the BESS upper cutoff up to about 100 GeV. We find that the simulated antiproton flux has strong dependence on the choice of interaction models. The present analysis seems to further indicate that the theoretical prediction of galactic antiproton spectrum may be uncertain by an appreciable amount due to our limited knowledge of particle interaction characteristics.