Related papers: Cosmic rays and antishadowing
The discovery of cosmic rays, a milestone in science, was based on the work by scientists in Europe and the New World and took place during a period characterised by nationalism and lack of communication. Many scientists that took part in…
After a century of observations, we still do not know the origin of cosmic rays. I will review the current state of cosmic ray observations at the highest energies, and their implications for proposed acceleration models and secondary…
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…
Galactic cosmic ray (CR) acceleration to the knee in the spectrum at a few PeV is only possible if the magnetic field ahead of a supernova remnant (SNR) shock is strongly amplified by CR escaping the SNR. A model formulated in terms of the…
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…
Cosmic rays are charged relativistic particles that reach the Earth with extremely high energies, providing striking evidence of the existence of effective accelerators in the Universe. Below an energy around $\sim 10^{17}$ eV cosmic rays…
I discuss recent advances being made in the physics and astrophysics of cosmic rays and cosmic gamma-rays at the highest observed energies as well as the related physics and astrophysics of very high energy cosmic neutrinos. I also discuss…
The impressive power-law decay of the energy spectrum of cosmic rays over more than thirty orders of magnitude in intensity and for energies ranging over eleven decades between $\simeq 10^9 $eV and $\simeq 10^{20} $eV is actually dotted…
The cosmic rays spectrum has been shown to extend well beyond 10^20 eV. With nearly 20 events observed in the last 40 years, it is now established that particles with energies near or above 10^21 eV. No nearby astrophysical object has been…
The all-particle spectrum of cosmic rays measured at Earth has a knee-like feature around 4 PeV. A priori, it is not clear if this is a local feature specific to the Solar neighbourhood in the Milky Way, or if it is a generic property of…
The study of the gamma-ray radiation produced by cosmic rays that escape their accelerators is of paramount importance for (at least) two reasons: first, the detection of those gamma-ray photons can serve to identify the sources of cosmic…
Cosmic high energy neutrinos are inextricably linked to the origin of cosmic rays which is one of the major unresolved questions in astrophysics. In particular, the highest energy cosmic rays observed possess macroscopic energies and their…
In view of recent developments attention is directed again at two aspects of the well known 'knee' in the cosmic ray energy spectrum at 3 PeV: the mass of the predominant particles at this energy and their source. It is inevitable in a…
The highest energy cosmic rays observed possess macroscopic energies and their origin is likely to be associated with the most energetic processes in the Universe. Their existence triggered a flurry of theoretical explanations ranging from…
We show that the simplest assumptions for the dynamics of particle production allow us to understand the fluxes of hadrons and photons at mountain altitudes as well as the structure of individual events. The analysis requires a heavy…
We briefly review sources of cosmic rays, their composition and spectra as well as their propagation in the galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields, both regular and fluctuating. A special attention is paid to the recent results of the…
Recent measurements of the spectrum and composition of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays suggest that their extragalactic sources may be accelerating heavy nuclei in addition to protons. This can suppress the cosmogenic neutrino flux relative to…
I discuss a theory of non-solar cosmic rays (CRs) based on a single type of CR source at all energies. All observed properties of CRs are predicted in terms of very simple and completely `standard' physics. The source of CRs is extremely…
Diffusive shock acceleration is the prime candidate for efficient acceleration of cosmic rays. Galactic cosmic rays are believed to originate predominantly from this process in supernova remnant shock waves. Confinement of the cosmic rays…
The possibility to reduce the background due to cosmic ray charged particles by the use of magnetic field in the ground based low energy particle detectors is explored. The degree of reduction of cosmic rays as a function of the magnetic…