Related papers: Extragalactic cosmic ray self-confinement around s…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays are mostly charged particles and they are therefore deflected by magnetic fields on their path from their sources to Earth. An interesting phenomenon arising from these deflections is the appearance of multiple…
The little we do know of the physical conditions in gamma-ray bursters makes them conducive to the acceleration of high-energy cosmic rays, especially if they are at cosmological distances. We find that, with the observed statistics and…
The origin of the particles in the highest energy end of the cosmic ray spectrum is discussed in the context of the wider problem of the origin of the whole cosmic radiation as observed at the Earth. In particular we focus our attention on…
Galactic cosmic rays are believed to be accelerated at supernova remnants via diffusive shock acceleration. Though this mechanism gives fairly robust predictions for the spectrum of particles accelerated at the shock, the spectrum of the…
The existence of cosmic rays of energies exceeding 10^20 eV is one of the mysteries of high energy astrophysics. The spectrum and the high energy to which it extends rule out almost all suggested source models. The challenges posed by…
The origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays remains a mystery. The lack of a high energy cutoff in the cosmic ray spectrum together with an apparently isotropic distribution of arrival directions have strongly constrained most models…
We consider a possibility of identification of sources of cosmic rays (CR) of the energy above 1 TeV via observation of degree-scale extended gamma-ray emission which traces the locations of recent sources in the Galaxy. Such emission in…
We shortly discuss several astrophysical scenarios leading to cosmic ray acceleration up to extremely high energies reaching the scale of 10^{20} eV. The processes suggested in the literature include acceleration at relativistic jet…
Possible existence of extragalactic ultra-high energy cosmic ray sources giving a very small particle flux on the Earth is considered. Accretion discs around supermassive black holes where particles are accelerated in electric fields are…
It is commonly accepted that high energy cosmic rays up to $10^{19}$ eV can be produced in catastrophic astrophysical processes. However the source of a few observed events with higher energies remains mysterious. We propose that they may…
It is thought that Galactic cosmic ray (CR) nuclei are gradually accelerated to high energies (up to ~300 TeV/nucleon, where 1TeV=10^12eV) in the expanding shock-waves connected with the remnants of powerful supernova explosions. However,…
The long-held notion that the highest-energy cosmic rays are of distant extragalactic origin is challenged by observations that events above $\sim 10^{20}$ eV do not exhibit the expected high-energy cutoff from photopion production off the…
The recent discoveries of several reliable events of high energy cosmic rays at an energy above 10^20 eV raise questions about their path through the nearby universe. The two analyses of the Haverah Park data set and the Akeno data set…
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…
Contrary to expectations, several cosmic ray events with energies above $10^{20}$ eV have been observed. The flux of such events is well above the predicted Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff due to the pion production (via the $\Delta$…
The propagation of particles accelerated at supernova remnant shocks and escaping the parent remnants is likely to proceed in a strongly non-linear regime, due to the efficient self-generation of Alfv\'en waves excited through streaming…
From the analysis of the flux of high energy particles, $E>3\cdot 10^{18}eV$, it is shown that the distribution of the power density of extragalactic rays over energy is of the power law, ${\bar q}(E)\propto E^{-2.7}$, with the same index…
EGRET data on the Gamma ray emission from the inner Galaxy have shown a rather flat spectrum, extending to about 50 GeV. It is usually assumed that these gamma-rays arise from the interactions of cosmic ray nuclei with ambient matter.…
The origin of cosmic ray events with $E \gsim 10^{11}$ GeV remains mysterious. In this talk I briefly summarize several proposed particle physics explanations: a breakdown of Lorentz invariance, the ``$Z-$burst'' scenario, new hadrons with…
Observations of cosmic rays with energies above ~ 4 x 10^{10} GeV have inspired several speculative suggestions concerning their origin. The crucial question is whether or not the spectrum exhibits the expected `GZK cutoff' at this energy…