Related papers: Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: Origin, Composition…
One of the most challenging open questions regarding the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) deals with the shape of the source emission spectra. A commonly-used simplifying assumption is that the source spectra of the highest…
Large-scale accretion shocks around massive clusters of galaxies, generically expected in the cold dark matter scenario of cosmological structure formation, are shown to be plausible sources of the observed ultrahigh energy cosmic rays…
Research in cosmic rays is now nearly a century old, but most of the fundamental questions in this field remain unanswered, on the other hand the perspectives of future studies in the next decade are very bright. New detectors will provide…
The field of astroparticle physics is currently developing rapidly, since new experiments challenge our understanding of the investigated processes. Three messengers can be used to extract information on the properties of astrophysical…
Neutrinos at energies ranging from sub-TeV to EeV from astrophysical sources can yield interesting physical information about fundamental interactions, about cosmic rays and about the nature of the sources and their environment. Gamma-ray…
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…
Two of the greatest mysteries of modern physics are the origin of the dark matter in the universe and the nature of the highest energy particles in the cosmic ray spectrum. We discuss here possible direct and indirect connections between…
We compute the ultra-high energy cosmic ray horizon, i.e. the distance up to which cosmic ray sources may significantly contribute to the fluxes above a certain threshold on the observed energies. We obtain results both for proton and heavy…
A brief review about the chemical composition of cosmic rays in the energy range 10^15 < E < 10^20 eV is given. While there is convincing evidence for an increasingly heavier composition above the knee, no clear picture has emerged at the…
The possibility for a self-consistent description of all the basic features of the observed cosmic ray spectra and primary composition variations in the energy range of $10^{15}\div 10^{20}$ eV within the Galactic origin scenario is…
A review of the recent achievements in high energy neutrino physics and, partly, neutrino astrophysics is presented. It is argued that experiments with high energy neutrinos of natural origin can be used for a search of new physics effects…
It is argued that there are three `origins' of cosmic rays; the origin of the particles, the origin of the energy, and the site of the acceleration. The evidence for each origin is discussed and a plausible synthesis outlined for the…
The chemical composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays is a key question in particle astrophysics. The measured composition, inferred from the elongation rates of cosmic ray showers, looks in general very different from the initial…
The sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are still one of the main open questions in high-energy astrophysics. If UHECRs are accelerated in astrophysical sources, they are expected to produce high-energy photons and neutrinos…
Recent high energy gamma-ray observations of both single supernova remnants and superbubbles, together with observations of supernovae, star formation regions, and local cosmic ray composition, now provide an integrated framework tying…
The origin and properties of the cosmic radiation are one of the most intriguing question in modern astrophysics. The precise measurement of the chemical composition and energy spectra of the cosmic rays provides fundamental insight into…
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…
It is likely that ultra-high energy cosmic rays contain a significant component of heavy or intermediate mass nuclei. The propagation of ultra-high energy nuclei through cosmic radiation backgrounds is more complicated than that of protons…
This contribution discusses some of the main problems in high energy astrophysics, and the perspectives to solve them using different types of "messengers": cosmic rays, photons and neutrinos
The next generation of ultra high energy cosmic ray experiments will probably detect several dozens of events clustered around the direction towards each of the most powerful extragalactic sources. We develop a method which could make…