Related papers: Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays and Hilbertian Repulsiv…
Extragalactic background of high energy neutrinos arising from the interactions of cosmic ray protons with far-infrared extragalactic background radiation is calculated. The main assumption is that the cosmic ray spectrum at energies higher…
A review of several analyses is presented that forces the conclusion that the mass composition of the highest-energy cosmic rays is not proton-dominated. This deduction, combined with the use of a modern hadronic interaction model, should…
The origin of high-energy cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that continuously impact Earth's atmosphere, has been a mystery for over a century. Due to deflection in interstellar magnetic fields, cosmic rays from the Milky Way arrive at Earth from…
More than 100 years after the discovery of cosmic rays and various experimental efforts, the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (E > 100 PeV) remains unclear. The understanding of production and propagation effects of these highest…
Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, UHECR, are charged particles with energies between $\sim10^{18}\,{\rm eV}$ and $\sim3\times10^{20}\,{\rm eV}\sim50\,{\rm J}$. They exhibit fundamental physics at energies inaccessible to terrestrial…
The origin of Ultra--High Energy ($E \gsim 10^{20}$ eV) Cosmic Rays (UHECR) remains mysterious. I discuss ``top--down'' models, where UHECR originate from the decay of very massive, long--lived particles. I summarize the calculation of the…
The main goal of the present lectures is to outline the key particle interactions and energy loss mechanisms in the Galactic medium that high-energy particles are subject to. These interactions are an important ingredient entering the…
Observations of cosmic rays have been improving at all energies, with higher statistics and reduced systematics. Fundamental questions remain regarding the origins of cosmic rays both within the Galaxy and in extragalactic sources, and new…
The observation of neutrinos from cosmic accelerators will be revolutionary. High energy neutrinos are closely connected to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays and their sources. Cosmic ray sources are likely to produce neutrinos and the…
In this article we examine the hypothesis that the highest energy cosmic rays are complex nuclei from extragalactic sources. Under reasonable physical assumptions, we show that the nearby metally rich starburst galaxies (M82 and NGC 253)…
Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory show energy dependent chemical composition of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with a growing fraction of heavy elements at high energies. This points to a non-negligible contribution of…
This is a summary of a series of lectures on the current experimental and theoretical status of our understanding of origin and nature of cosmic radiation. Specific focus is put on ultra-high energy cosmic radiation above ~10^17 eV,…
If decays of superheavy relic particles in the galactic halo are responsible for ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, these particles must be clustered to account for small-scale anisotropy in the AGASA data. We show that the masses of such…
We consider the astrophysical implications of the diffusion equation solution for Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) in the expanding universe, obtained in paper I (V.Berezinsky & A.Gazizov, ApJ 643 (2006) 8). The UHECR spectra are…
It has been speculated that cosmic string networks could produce ultra-high energy cosmic rays as a by-product of their evolution. By making use of recent work on the evolution of such networks, it will be shown that the flux of cosmic rays…
Most models of the origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays rely on the existence of luminous extragalactic sources. Cosmic rays escaping the galaxy where the source is located produce a sufficiently large electric current to justify the…
The search for the origin of cosmic rays is a quest of almost a hundred years. A recent theoretical proposal gives quantitative predictions, which can be tested with data. Specifically, it has been suggested, that all cosmic rays can be…
We show that a tiny but non-zero positive cosmological constant, which has been strongly suggested by the recent astronomical observations on supernovae and CMBR, may change notably the behaviors of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray…
A model for high-energy (>10^14 eV) cosmic rays (HECRs) from galactic and extragalactic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is summarized. Relativistic outflows in GRBs are assumed to inject power-law distributions of CR protons and ions to the highest…
Determining the energy and mass of the highest energy cosmic rays requires knowledge of features of particle interactions at energies beyond those reached at the LHC. Inadequacies of the model predictions set against a variety of data are…