Extensive Air Showers and Cosmic Ray Physics above 1017eV

Cosmic Rays above 1017 eV allow studying hadronic interactions at energies that can not be attained at accelerators yet. At the same time hadronic interaction models have to be applied to the cosmic-ray induced air-shower cascades in atmosphere to infer the nature of cosmic rays. The reliability of air-shower simulations has become the source of one of the largest systematic uncertainty in the interpretation of cosmic-ray data due to the uncertainties in modeling the hadronic interaction driving the air-shower development. This paper summarises in the first part the recent results on the cosmic ray energy spectrum, composition and anisotropy from the knee region to the GZK cutoff [1, 2] of the spectrum by means of ground-based experiments. Most of the information reported in this contribution is taken from [3–5]. Aspects interconnecting cosmic ray and particle physics are reviewed in the second part of the paper.