Related papers: Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays and Absolute Referen…
The production of ultra high-energy cosmic rays in de Sitter invariant vacuum states is considered. Assuming the present-day universe is asymptoting toward a future de Sitter phase, we argue the observed flux of cosmic rays places a bound…
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…
The study of high energy cosmic rays is a diversified field of observational and phenomenological physics addressing questions ranging from shock acceleration of charged particles in various astrophysical objects, via transport properties…
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an…
The energy spectrum and mass composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays inferred at the Pierre Auger Observatory are used to derive a benchmark scenario for the emission mechanisms at play in extragalactic accelerators as well as for…
Searches for anisotropies due to Earth's motion relative to a preferred frame -- modern versions of the Michelson-Morley experiment -- provide precise verifications of special relativity. We describe other tests, independent of this motion,…
The energy density of the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) in the Universe is a very important parameter for the solution of the puzzle of their origin. It defines the luminosity of the UHECR sources and thus the type of objects they…
We develop a perturbative framework with which to discuss departures from exact Lorentz invariance and explore their potentially observable ramifications. Tiny non-invariant terms introduced into the standard model Lagrangian are assumed to…
The study of the interactions of Cosmic Rays (CR's) with universal diffuse background radiation can provide very stringent tests of the validity of Special Relativity. The interactions we consider are the ones characterized by well defined…
We review the basic ideas on the origin of cosmic rays with energy in excess of $\sim 10^{19}$ eV, in the light of the most recent observational findings. The limited statistics of events detected by the two largest experiments currently…
Recent measurements of the properties of cosmic rays above 10^17 eV are summarized and implications on our contemporary understanding of their origin are discussed. Cosmic rays with energies exceeding 10^20 eV have been measured, they are…
We investigate the possibility that cosmic rays of energy larger than the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff are not nucleons, but a new stable, massive, hadron that appears in many extensions of the standard model. We focus primarily on the…
Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory are presented, focusing on a measurement of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum above 10^18 eV, cosmic-ray composition, and the anisotropy in the cosmic ray arrival directions. The flux of cosmic…
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…
The paper describes methods used for the detection of cosmic rays with energies above 10^18 eV (UHECR, UltraHigh Energy Cosmic Rays). It had been anticipated there would be a cutoff in the energy spectrum of primary cosmic rays around 3…
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…
Cosmic rays may provide opportunities for probing fundamental physics. For example, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays might originate from the decays of metastable heavy particles, and astrophysical gamma rays can be used to test models of…
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…
Models with extra space-time dimensions produce, tipically, a 4D effective theory whose vacuum is not exactly Lorentz invariant but can be considered a physical medium whose refractive index is determined by the gravitational field. This…
We point out that the presence of energetic cosmic rays above the GZK cutoff may be explained by fundamental non-linearities in quantum mechanics at the Plank level.