PHYSICS OF pO COLLISIONS AT THE LHC WITH PROTON AND NEUTRON TAGGING

A short run of proton-oxygen (pO) collisions is planned at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to improve the modeling of air showers, which are described using hadronic Monte Carlo simulations. The very forward proton and neutron detectors introduced by the ATLAS and CMS experiments could provide a unique opportunity to study elastic and diffractive interactions in pO collisions for the first time at center-of-mass energies above the TeV scale. In these proceedings, we will present the impact of proton and neutron tagging on the measurement of the diffractive components and discuss the perspectives of measuring decay products of oxygen ions after dissociation.