A composition analysis of KASCADE air shower data is performed by means ofunfolding the two-dimensional frequency spectrum of electron and muon numbers.Aim of the analysis is the determination of energy spectra for elemental groupsrepresenting the chemical composition of primary cosmic rays. Since such ananalysis depends crucially on simulations of air showers the two differenthadronic interaction models QGSJet and SIBYLL are used for their generation.The resulting primary energy spectra show that the knee in the all particlespectrum is due to a steepening of the spectra of light elements but, also,that neither of the two simulation sets is able to describe the measured dataconsistently over the whole energy range with discrepancies appearing indifferent energy regions.
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