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Propagation of ultra-high energy photons in the solar magnetosphere gives rise to cascades comprising thousands of photons. We study the cascade development using Monte Carlo simulations and find that the photons in the cascades are spatially extended over millions of kilometers on the plane distant from the Sun by 1 AU. We estimate the chance of detection considering upper limits from current cosmic rays observatories in order to provide an optimistic estimate rate of 0.002 events per year from a chosen ring-shaped region around the Sun. We compare results from simulations which use two models of the solar magnetic field, and show that although signatures of such cascades are different for the models used, for practical detection purpose in the ground-based detectors, they are similar.

The 15th International Conference Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM) took place at the Veksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics (VBLHEP) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna in the period July 6 -11, with a record participation of 244 people from 31 countries! The previous meeting of the series in Birmingham 2013 had collected 158 physicists from 25 countries [J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 509, 011001 (2014)]. At SQM-2015, there was also a record participation of young scientist; every 4th conference attendee did not yet hold a PhD degree! There was a special program of 4 general lectures, a devoted session of parallel talks for Young Talents and the Helmholtz International Summer School (HISS) with 16 lecturers on the topics regarding Dense Matter (29.06.-11.07.) as a satellite event at the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics (BLTP) and at VBLHEP. Another satellite event was the Round TableWorkshop on Physics at NICA, jointly organized by JINR and the Republic of South Africa on July 5, 2015. The selection of Dubna as the place for SQM-2015 conference by the International Advisory Committee (IAC) demonstrates the broad interest of the community in the progress of the Russian Megascience Project on the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility (NICA) hosted at JINR Dubna. In a few years from now the experiments planned at NICA will produce data that provide new information of unprecedented accuracy which will help to answer some of the key questions which are topical at this conference. The SQM-2015 conference had an ambitious scientific program with 38 plenary talks, 97 parallel talks in 7 topical directions and 39 posters reporting the state of the research and the future directions in the fields of strangeness, heavy avors and bulk physics, suggested by the IAC to be the subtitle of the conference from 2016 onwards. Most of the contributions are represented in these Proceedings which we recommend to the community! We gratefully acknowledge support from the JINR Dubna, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung via the Heisenberg-Landau program, the Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnistwa Wyzszego via the Bogoliubov-Infeld program, the LOEWE program via HIC for FAIR, the Helmholtz Association with their centres DESY, FZ Julich, GSI Darmstadt, HZ Dresden-Rossendorf, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Helmholtz Institutes in Mainz and Jena via the HISS programme. We thank the IAC for their help and advice in planning the conference, and we are grateful to the members of the Local Organisation Committee for their help in during the conference as well as to Niels-Uwe Bastian, Alexandra Friesen, Mark Alexander Kaltenborn and Irina Pirozhenko for their assistance in preparing these Proceedings.

The main objective of the Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) is the detection and analysis of extended cosmic ray phenomena, so-called super-preshowers (SPS), using existing as well as new infrastructure (cosmic-ray observatories, educational detectors, single detectors etc.). The search for ensembles of cosmic ray events initiated by SPS is yet an untouched ground, in contrast to the current state-of-the-art analysis, which is focused on the detection of single cosmic ray events. Theoretical explanation of SPS could be given either within classical (e.g., photon-photon interaction) or exotic (e.g., Super Heavy Dark Matter decay or annihilation) scenarios, thus detection of SPS would provide a better understanding of particle physics, high energy astrophysics and cosmology. The ensembles of cosmic rays can be classified based on the spatial and temporal extent of particles constituting the ensemble. Some classes of SPS are predicted to have huge spatial distribution, a unique signature detectable only with a facility of the global size. Since development and commissioning of a completely new facility with such requirements is economically unwarranted and time-consuming, the global analysis goals are achievable when all types of existing detectors are merged into a worldwide network. The idea to use the instruments in operation is based on a novel trigger algorithm: in parallel to looking for neighbour surface detectors receiving the signal simultaneously, one should also look for spatially isolated stations clustered in a small time window., arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.05196