Related papers: Ultra-high energy cosmic ray sources and large sca…
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…
Using the propagation of ultra high energy nucleons, photons and electrons in the universal radiation backgrounds, we obtain limits on the luminosity of topological defects scenarios for the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. The…
One of the models recently proposed to explain the origin of the ultra high energy cosmic rays assumes that these particles may be accelerated by the electromotive force around presently inactive quasar remnants. We study predictions for…
Arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays from the direction of ten brightest radio sources lying within 50 Mpc from our Galaxy were studied by using recent models of the largescale Galactic magnetic field. A detailed study, where…
High energy cosmic rays allow probing phenomena that are inacessible to accelerators. Observation of cosmic rays, presumebly protons, with energies beyond $4 \times 10^{19} eV$, the so-called Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cut-off, give…
Cosmic rays with energies above $10^{18}$ eV are currently of considerable interest in astrophysics and are to be further studied in a number of projects which are either currently under construction or the subject of well-developed…
An extensive program for the calculation of galactic cosmic-ray propagation has been developed. Primary and secondary nucleons, primary and secondary electrons, secondary positrons and antiprotons are included. Fragmentation and energy…
If there are large extra dimensions and the fundamental Planck scale is at the TeV scale, then the question arises of whether ultra-high energy cosmic rays might probe them. We study the neutrino-nucleon cross section in these models. The…
In this paper, we study the propagation of cosmic-ray nuclei and protons. We emphasize the influence of the source composition on the expected spectrum and composition on Earth as well as on the phenomenology of the transition from Galactic…
One of the most striking astrophysical phenomena today is the existence of cosmic ray particles with energies in excess of 10^20 eV. While their presence has been confirmed by a number of experiments, it is not clear where and how these…
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, accelerated hadrons that can exceed energies of $10^{20}$ eV, are the highest-energy particles ever observed. While the sources producing UHECRs are still unknown, the Pierre Auger Observatory has detected a…
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…
We estimate the sensitivity of various experiments detecting ultra-high-energy cosmic rays to primary photons with energies above 10^19 eV. We demonstrate that the energy of a primary photon may be significantly (up to a factor of ~ 10)…
We demonstrate by numerical flux calculations that neutrino beams producing the observed highest energy cosmic rays by weak interactions with the relic neutrino background require a non-uniform distribution of sources. Such sources have to…
We study the effects that the diffusion of the cosmic rays in the magnetic field of the Local Supercluster can have on the spectrum of a nearby extragalactic source at ultrahigh energies. We find that the strong enhancement of the flux…
Cosmic rays have been observed up to energies $10^8$ times larger than those of the best particle accelerators. Studies of astrophysical particles (hadrons, neutrinos and photons) at their highest observed energies have implications for…
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…
Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, UHECR, are charged particles with energies between $\sim10^{18}\,{\rm eV}$ and $\sim3\times10^{20}\,{\rm eV}\sim50\,{\rm J}$. They exhibit fundamental physics at energies inaccessible to terrestrial…
The surprising isotropy of the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) sky makes it difficult to identify their sources. Observables such as energy spectrum, mass composition and arrival directions are affected by interactions with background…
If ultra-high-energy cosmic rays originate from extragalactic sources, the offsets of their arrival directions from these sources imply an upper limit on the strength of the extragalactic magnetic field. The Pierre Auger Collaboration has…