Related papers: Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Accelerators
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…
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…
Ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) protons produced by uniformly distributed astrophysical sources contradict the energy spectrum measured by both the AGASA and HiRes experiments, assuming the small scale clustering of UHECR observed by…
This is a review of neutrino astronomy anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of $10^{20}$ and $10^{13}$ eV, respectively. Although the discovery of cosmic rays dates back close…
The origin of the highest energy cosmic rays remains an enigma. They offer a window to new physics, including tests of physical laws relevant to their propagation and interactions, at energies unattainable by terrestrial accelerators. They…
Cosmic rays with energies beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin `cutoff' at $\sim 4 \times 10^{10}$ GeV pose a conundrum, the solution of which requires either drastic revision of our astrophysical understanding, or new physics beyond the…
In this report we review the important progress made in recent years towards understanding the experimental data on ultra-high-energy ($E \gtrsim 10^9$ GeV) cosmic rays. We begin with a general survey of the available data, including a…
Relativistic winds of fast-spinning pulsars have been proposed as a potential site for cosmic-ray acceleration from very high energies (VHE) to ultrahigh energies (UHE). We re-examine conditions for high-energy neutrino production,…
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…
In this chapter I give an overview of shock acceleration, including a discussion of the maximum energies possible and the shape of the spectrum near cut-off, interactions of high energy cosmic rays with, and propagation through, the…
The physics of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays will be reviewed, discussing the latest experimental results and theoretical models aiming at explaining the observations in terms of spectra, mass composition and possible sources. It will be…
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…
Ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) pose a problem either for particle physics or for astrophysics (or for both) by the unexpectedly high number of cosmic ray showers observed with energy above about 5x10^{19}eV, the…
The origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays promises to lead us to a deeper understanding of the structure of matter. This is possible through the study of particle collisions at center-of-mass energies in interactions far larger than…
We address some current theoretical issues around ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We recall that scenarios producing more gamma-rays than cosmic rays up to high redshift can in general only provide a sub-dominant contribution to the…
The observation of twenty cosmic-ray air-showers at and above 10^{20} eV poses fascinating problems for particle astrophysics: how the primary particles are accelerated to these energies, how the primaries get here through the 2.7K…
A simple model is exhibited in which the remnant density of charged vortons is used to provide candidates for explaining the observed ultra high energy cosmic rays (above $10^{20}$ eV). These vortons would be accelerated in active galaxies…
We discuss the most recent developments in our understanding of the acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays up to the highest energies. In particular we specialize our discussion to three issues: 1) developments in the theory of…
The origin of highest energy cosmic rays (UHECR) is yet unknown. In order to understand their propagation we determine the probability that an ultrahigh energy (above 5\cdot 10^{19} eV) proton created at a distance r with energy E arrives…
Young, fast-rotating neutron stars are promising candidate sources for the production of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The interest in this model has recently been boosted by the latest chemical composition measurements of cosmic…