Related papers: trans-GZK Cosmic Rays: Strings, Black Holes, Neutr…
We review the proposal that trans-GZK cosmic ray interactions are caused by neutrino primaries. The primaries cause excitations of strings and give rise to extensive air showers (EAS) resembling EAS induced by nuclei. We also show that in…
It has been suggested that the characteristic energy of string models may be considerably lower than the observed Planck mass. In such schemes, the unification of interactions takes place around the string scale, perhaps as low as a few…
String unification at a scale of a few tens of TeV explains the existence of cosmic ray interactions beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff. Trans-GZK cosmic rays are neutrinos which can penetrate the cosmic microwave background.…
After a short review of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray puzzle - the apparent observation of cosmic rays originating from cosmological distances with energies above the expected Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff 4x10^{19} eV - we consider…
In a large class of models the string excitation and black hole pictures invoked as an explanation of trans-GZK cosmic ray events are equivalent. Single particle inclusive distributions are thermal at the Hagedorn temperature. The hadron…
The suggestion is made that air showers with energies beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min spectral cut-off may have primary vertices some 6 km lower in height than those of proton initiated showers with energies below the GZK cut-off. This…
A review is given on the recently proposed idea that air showers with energy $> 10^{20}$ eV beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min cut-off may be due to neutrinos having acquired a strong interaction at these energies, as suggested by the…
The origin and nature of ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray events, above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff energy, constitute a long-standing, unsolved mistery. Neutrinos are proposed candidates but their standard interactions with matter…
It has been conjectured that the string and unification scales may be substantially lower than previously believed, perhaps a few TeV. In scenarios of this type, orbiting detectors such OWL or AIRWATCH can observe spectacular phenomena at…
It has been suggested that ultrahigh energy neutrinos can acquire cross-sections approaching hadronic size if the string scale is as low as 1-10 TeV. In this case, the vertical air showers observed with energies above the…
Extremely high energy neutrinos propagating in the atmosphere or in the Earth can originate horizontal or upgoing air-showers, respectively. We calculate the acceptances (event rate/flux) for detecting both types of events by fluorescence…
We propose a scenario in which a simple power-like primary spectrum for protons with sources at cosmological distances leads to a quantitative description of all the details of the observed cosmic ray spectrum for energies from 10^{17} eV…
We present a study of the multiplicities, of the lateral distributions and of the ratio of the electromagnetic to the hadronic components in the air showers, generated by the collision in the atmosphere of an incoming high energy cosmic ray…
If extra spacetime dimensions and low-scale gravity exist, black holes will be produced in observable collisions of elementary particles. For the next several years, ultra-high energy cosmic rays provide the most promising window on this…
We show that all features of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray spectrum from 10^{17} eV to 10^{21} eV can be described with a simple power-like injection spectrum of protons under the assumption that the neutrino-nucleon cross-section is…
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…
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…
The existence of extra degrees of freedom beyond the electroweak scale may allow the formation of black holes in nearly horizontal neutrino air showers. In this paper we examine the average properties of the light descendants of these black…
The Randall-Sundrum model with a small curvature is considered in which five-dimensional Planck scale lies in the TeV region, and a spectrum of Kaluza-Klein gravitons reminds that in one flat extra dimension. The cross sections for…
As is well recognized, the supernova explosions produce a great amount of neutrinos, thus we have a strong reason to believe that all violent cosmological events, such as supernova explosions, gamma bursts, black hole merging or neutron…