English

Electroweak jet cascading in the decay of superheavy particles

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-11-07 v1 Astrophysics

Abstract

We study decays of superheavy particles XX into leptons. We show that they initiate cascades similar to QCD parton jets, if mX\gsim106m_X\gsim 10^6 GeV. Electroweak cascading is studied and the energy spectra of the produced leptons are calculated in the framework of a broken SU(2) model of weak interactions. As application, important for the Z-burst model for ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, we consider decays of superheavy particles coupled on tree-level only to neutrinos and derive stringent limit for these decays from the observed diffuse extragalactic γ\gamma-ray flux.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0205218,
  title  = {Electroweak jet cascading in the decay of superheavy particles},
  author = {V. Berezinsky and M. Kachelriess and S. Ostapchenko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0205218},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 1 eps figure