Related papers: Low Scale String Unification and the Highest Energ…
Superconducting cosmic strings may be viewed as wires of thickness $1/\Lambda$ with $\Lambda=10^{16}$ TeV. We show that the weak interactions will spread out the current to distances $r= (1/M_Z)\ln (I/M_Z)$, where $I$ is the magnitude of…
It is not yet clear whether the observed flux suppression for ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) at energies above \simeq 4.10E19 eV is a signature of the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff or corresponds, for instance, to the maximum…
Ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CRs) of energies $\sim (10^{18}-10^{20})~{\rm eV}$, accelerated in violent astrophysical environments, interact with cosmic background radiation fields via photo-hadronic processes, leading to strong…
The rarest cosmic rays above the GZK cut'off $(E_{CR} \tilde{>} 10^{19} \div 10^{20} eV)$ are probably born at cosmic distances ($\tilde{>}$ tens Mpc) by AGNs (QSRs, BLac, Blazars...). Their puzzling survival over $2.75 K^o$ BBR radio waves…
The maximum distance bound for ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with energies above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmich cutoff $\sim 10^{19} eV$ relaxes significantly if there is some mechanism that forces UHECR to propagate in discrete…
The mass composition of high energy cosmic rays depends on their production, acceleration, and propagation. The study of cosmic ray composition can therefore reveal hints of the origin of these particles. At the South Pole, the IceCube…
We propose that the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays beyond the GZK cutoff and the origin of small cosmological constant can both be explained by vacuum tunneling effects in a theory with degenerate vacua and fermionic doublets. By…
The energies of cosmic rays, fully ionized charged nuclei, extend over a wide range up to 10^20 eV. A particularly interesting energy region spans from 10^14 to 10^18 eV, where the all-particle energy spectrum exhibits two interesting…
Astronomy at the highest energies observed must be performed by studying neutrinos rather than photons because the universe is opaque to photons of these energies. By making observations of neutrinos with energies above 10 EeV one can…
When high-energy cosmic rays impinge on a dense dielectric medium, radio waves are produced through the Askaryan effect. We show that at wavelengths comparable to the length of the shower produced by an Ultra-High Energy cosmic ray or…
The status of the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff and pair-production dip in Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) is discussed.They are the features in the spectrum of protons propagating through CMB radiation in extragalactic space,…
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…
The rise with energy of the neutrino--nucleon cross section implies that at energies above few TeV the Earth is becoming opaque to cosmic neutrinos. The neutrinos interact with the nucleons through the weak charged current, resulting into…
Neutrinos from far away sources annihilating at the Z resonance on relic neutrinos may give origin to the ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Here we present predictions of this mechanism with relic neutrinos lighter than 1 eV, which do not…
This is an introductory review about the on-going search for a signal of Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) in cosmic rays. We first summarise basic aspects of cosmic rays, focusing on rays of ultra high energy (UHECRs). We discuss the…
The flux of cosmic rays beyond the GZK cutoff ($\sim 10^{20}$ eV) may be explained through their production by ultra high energy cosmic neutrinos, annihilating on the relic neutrino background, in the vicinity of our galaxy. This process is…
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…
Based on a newly proposed mirror-matter model of neutron-mirror neutron ($n-n'$) oscillations, the puzzles related to ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are explained. In particular, the phenomena around the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK)…
Multidimensional modification of gravity with a smaller mass scale of the gravitational interaction is considered. Stable by assumption dark matter particles could decay via interactions with virtual black holes. The decay rates of such…
If neutrinos are a significant contributor to the matter density of the universe, then they should have $\sim$ eV mass and cluster in galactic (super) cluster halos, and possibly in galactic halos as well. It was noted in the early 1980's…