Measurement of the proton-air cross section with ARGO-YBJ

In this work the results of p-air cross section measurements with the ARGO-YBJ experiment are reported. The analysis is based on the different flux attenuation for different atmospheric depths (i.e. zenith angles), by exploiting the detector capabilities in selecting the shower development stage by means of the size, hit density and lateral profile measurements. The systematic errors introduced by fluctuations in shower development and heavier primaries have been taken into account. The results can give useful insights on p-air interactions at energies where hadronic interaction models start to give significantly different expectations and allow to infer the p-p total cross section in the energy region () not covered by experiments at accelerators.