The LHCf experiment at LHC

The LHCf experiment will be installed in 2007 on the LHC collider in the forward direction at ±140m from the ATLAS interaction point. The purpose of LHCf is to precisely measure the pion production cross section near zero degrees through the measurement of the photons produced in neutral pion decay. This measurement is crucial for the simulation of the showers induced in the atmosphere by very high energy cosmic rays; the 14 TeV energy available in the center of mass frame corresponds in fact to an equivalent energy of 10 ¹⁷ eV in the laboratory system. The paper focus on the proposed experiment and on the physics results that we expect from it.