Related papers: Cosmic rays from heavy particle decays
Extremely high energy (up to 10**(22) eV) cosmic neutrino beams initiate high energy particle cascades in the background of relic neutrinos from the Big Bang. We perform numerical calculations to show that such cascades could contribute…
Recent international efforts have brought us closer to unveiling the century old mystery of the origin of cosmic rays. Cosmic ray, gamma ray, and neutrino observatories are reaching the necessary sensitivity to study the highest energy…
Although cosmic rays were discovered 90 years ago, we do not know how and where they are accelerated. There is compelling evidence that the highest energy cosmic rays are extra-galactic -- they cannot be contained by our galaxy's magnetic…
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…
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…
We explore scenarios where the highest energy cosmic rays are produced by new particle physics near the grand unification scale. Using detailed numerical simulations of extragalactic nucleon, gamma-ray, and neutrino propagation, we show the…
The flux of high energy cosmic rays coming from the decay of vortons is estimated. If the abundance of loops corresponding to a superconductivity scale coincident with that of the string formation is corrected to be compatible with the…
Scattering processes in the cosmic microwave background limit the propagation of ultra high energy charged particles in our Universe. For extragalactic proton sources resonant photopion production results in the famous…
We have shown that inflatons with a mass which is calculated to be of the order of $10^{10}\GeV$ can constitute a dominant part of dark matter. They can decay uniquely into a neutrino and antineutrino with a lifetime calculated to be…
The expected proton and neutrino fluxes from decays of massive metastable relic particles is calculated using the HERWIG QCD event generator. The predicted proton spectrum can account for the observed flux of extremely high energy cosmic…
Ongoing experimental efforts to detect cosmic sources of high energy neutrinos are guided by the expectation that astrophysical accelerators of cosmic ray protons would also generate neutrinos through interactions with ambient matter and/or…
An attractive class of SUSY-breaking mechanisms predicts a photino mass of order 1 GeV. Relic photinos can naturally account for the observed dark matter. Detection of these light photinos is discussed and contrasted with conventional…
Existing data hints that high energy cosmic ray experiments may offer the most promissing shot at finding a dark matter particle. A search in the PeV mass range is suggested, where the discovery of such a particle might help explain the GZK…
The origin of highest energy cosmic rays is yet unknown. An appealing possibility is the so-called Z-burst scenario, in which a large fraction of these cosmic rays are decay products of Z bosons produced in the scattering of ultrahigh…
Gravitino dark matter, together with thermal leptogenesis, implies an upper bound on the masses of superparticles. In the case of broken R-parity the constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis are naturally satisfied and decaying…
Stable, quantized gravitational bound states of primordial black holes called Holeums could have been produced in the early universe and could be a component of the Super Heavy Dark Matter (SHDM) present in galactic halos. We show that…
The possibility that the Fermi scale is the only fundamental energy scale of Nature is under serious consideration at present, yet cosmic rays may already have provided direct evidence of new physics at a much higher scale. The recent…
We carry out a detailed analysis of fluxes of cosmic ray antiprotons, positrons, electrons and photons to be expected from the annihilation of relic heavy neutrinos in the galactic halo. The spectra of particles are evaluated by Monte Carlo…
Explanations of the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays are severely constrained by the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min effect, which limits their propagation over cosmological distances. We argue that possible departures from strict Lorentz…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are sources of energetic, highly variable fluxes of gamma rays, which demonstrates that they are powerful particle accelerators. Besides relativistic electrons, GRBs should also accelerate high-energy hadrons, some…