The hadronic showering process is dominated by a succession of inelastic hadronic interactions. At high energy, these are characterized by multiparticle production and particle emission originating from nuclear decay of excited nuclei. Due to the relatively frequent generation of 's, there is also an electromagnetic component present in hadronic showers.
Secondaries are mostly pions and nucleons.
The hadronic multiplication process is measured at the scale of nuclear interaction length , which is essentially energy-independent. A considerable fraction of the energy of the incident particle is spent on reactions which do not result in an observable signal.