Importance of high pt and nuclear physics for simulating UHECR Air Showers

Observational evidence from Auger and earlier experiments shows a deficit of signal in a surface detector compared to predictions, which increases as a function of zenith angle, when the energy of the event is fixed by fluorescence measurements. We explore three potential explanations for this: The "Cronin effect" (growth of high-transverse momentum cross sections with nuclear size), the need for more particles at high transverse momentum in p-p collisions than currently predicted by high energy hadronic models used for air shower simulations, and the possibility that secondary interactions in the target air nucleus produces additional relatively soft pions not included in simulations. We report here on the differences between Pythia and QGSJet II, especially for high pt particles. The possible impact of these effects on the predicted surface array signal are also reported.