Search for coincident air showers over large scale distances with the EEE network

The existence of time correlations in detectors separated by distances much larger than the size of the highest energy extensive air showers (EAS) has been long discussed over the years. Several mechanisms have been proposed to justify the existence of such events and, in the last decade, some experiments have also tried to search for correlations on a large scale distance, beyond one hundred kilometers. The approaches were based on the construction of clusters of detectors placed at large relative distances, with the capability of selecting extensive air showers. Within this context, the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) experiment can provide new inputs in the search for long distance correlations, thanks to its sparse array of muon telescopes spanning all the Italian territory. The EEE telescopes are taking data since more than 10 years and enough statistics has been already accumulated to be able to search for such events, whose observation is intrinsically difficult due to the very low rates expected, many order of magnitudes smaller than the overall cosmic ray flux. In order to reduce the accidental correlations, different analysis approaches have been investigated for the selection of EAS events with the EEE telescopes. In this paper we will present preliminary results obtained by analyzing a large fraction of the statistics currently available.