Diffractive contribution to the elasticity and to the nucleonic flux in the atmosphere

We perform an analysis of the nucleonic and hadronic fluxes in the atmosphere by considering two components for the nucleon scattering, namely non-diffractive and diffractive interactions. It is shown that, albeit small, the diffractive component is really necessary to get good agreement with data An analysis of the proton-proton total cross section and proton-air inelastic cross section, both extracted from cosmic-ray data, is also presented.