Related papers: Astroparticle Physics: Puzzles and Discoveries
The nature of the unknown sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays can be revealed through the detection of the GZK feature in the cosmic ray spectrum, resulting from the production of pions by ultra-high energy protons scattering off the…
A new feature in the spectrum of ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) has been announced in the paper by Berezinsky, Gazizov and Kachelriess. The ratio of the solution of the exact transport equation to its solution in the continuous…
High-energy cosmic rays are observed indirectly by detecting the extensive air showers initiated in Earth's atmosphere. The interpretation of these observations relies on accurate models of air shower physics, which is a challenge and an…
The energetics of electromagnetic acceleration of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is constrained both by confinement of a particle within an acceleration site and by radiative energy losses of the particle in the confining magnetic…
The HiRes Collaboration has recently announced preliminary measurements of the energy spectrum of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR), as seen in monocular analyses from each of the two HiRes sites. This spectrum is consistent with the…
Particle physics suggests that the Universe may have undergone several phase transitions, including the well-known inflationary event associated with the separation of the strong and electroweak forces in grand unified theories. The…
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays passing through the central region of the Galaxy interact with starlight and the infrared photons. Both nuclei and protons generate secondary fluxes of photons and neutrinos on their passage through the central…
Gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most violent events in the universe, are one of the few viable candidates to produce ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. Recently, observations have revealed that GRBs generally originate from metal-poor…
It is now widely acknowledged that cosmic rays experiments can test possible new physics directly generated at the Planck scale or at some other fundamental scale. By studying particle properties at energies far beyond the reach of any…
In this article the cosmological constant problems, as well as the astronomical evidence for a cosmologically significant homogeneous exotic energy density with negative pressure (quintessence), are reviewed for a broad audience of…
Ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) protons produced by uniformly distributed astrophysical sources contradict the energy spectrum measured by both the AGASA and HiRes experiments, assuming the small scale clustering of UHECR observed by…
The mystery of the Dark energy is not just its smallness. The extreme fine tuning of its density in the Early Universe such that it permits galaxy formation before creating a new inflationary epoch is its other unexplained aspect. Here we…
Understanding the origins of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) - which reach energies in excess of $10^{20}~{\rm eV}$ - stretches particle acceleration physics to its very limits. In this review, we discuss how such energies can be…
Faced by recent evidence for a flat universe dominated by dark energy, cosmologists grapple with deep cosmic enigmas such as the cosmological constant problem, extreme fine-tuning and the cosmic coincidence problem. The extent to which we…
We explore scenarios where the highest energy cosmic rays (HECR) are produced by new particle physics near the grand unification scale. Using detailed numerical simulations of extragalactic cosmic and gamma-ray propagation, we show the…
The wealth of data collected in the last few years thanks to the Pierre Auger Observatory and recently to the Telescope Array made the problem of the origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays a genuinely experimental/observational one. The…
The most energetic particles ever detected exceed $10^{20}$ eV in energy. Their existence represents at the same time a great challenge for particle physics and astrophysics, and a great promise of providing us for a probe of the validity…
I further test the theory that the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) is made of photons with a weak U(1) component. Tipler (2005) has previously argued that the consistency of the Standard Model (SM) with the Second Law of Thermodynamics…
In the last years a general consensus has emerged on the use of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) data as a powerful probe of the validity of special relativity. This applies in particular to the propagation of cosmic rays from their…
On the analogy with the Lamb shift, we study the vacuum effect that proton's electric field interacts with virtual particles in the vacuum. We find a possible quantum instability that triggered by an external force, proton's electric field…