CORSIKA 8 -- the next-generation air shower simulation framework

Abstract: For more than 20 years, the community has heavily relied on CORSIKA for the simulation of extensive air showers, their Cherenkov light emission and their radio signals. While tremendously successful, the Fortran-based monolithic design of CORSIKA up to version 7 limits adaptation to new experimental needs, for example, in complex scenarios where showers transition from air into dense media, and to new computing paradigms such as the use of multi-core and GPU parallelization. With CORSIKA 8, we have reimplemented the core functionality of CORSIKA in a modern, modular, C++-based simulation framework, and successfully validated it against CORSIKA 7. Here, we discuss the philosophy of CORSIKA 8, showcase some example applications, and present the current state of implementation as well as the plans for the future.