Related papers: The Neutron as an Alternative Explanation for the …
The neutron fraction in the very high energy cosmic rays near the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff energy is analyzed by taking into account the time dilation effect of the neutron decays and also the pion photoproduction behaviors…
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…
Explanations of the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays are severely constrained by the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuz'min effect, which limits their propagation over cosmological distances. We argue that possible departures from strict Lorentz…
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…
Neutrinos are the best candidates to test the extreme Universe and ideas beyond the Standard Model of particle Physics. Once produced, neutrinos do not suffer any kind of attenuation by intervening radiation fields like the Cosmic Microwave…
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…
Cosmic rays of energies larger than the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff may be neutrinos if they acquire strong interactions due to a ``precocious unification'' of forces. A scenario for this to happen is outlined. There is no…
Observation of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) -whose energy exceeds $10^20$eV- is still a puzzle for modern astrophysics. The transfer of more than 16 Joules to a microscopic particle can hardly be achieved, even in the most powerful…
Cosmic rays are often modeled as charged particles. This allows their non-ballistic propagation in magnetized structures to be captured. In certain situations, a neutral cosmic ray component can arise. For example, cosmic ray neutrons are…
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…
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…
We review the hypothesis that the acceleration of protons at internal shocks in Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) could be the origin of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) observed at earth, E_max > 10^19 eV. We find that, even though protons…
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…
In the first part of this review we discuss the basic observational features at the end of the cosmic ray energy spectrum. We also present there the main characteristics of each of the experiments involved in the detection of these…
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…
The surprising lack of a high energy cutoff in the cosmic ray spectrum at the highest energies together with an apparently isotropic distribution of arrival directions have strongly challenged most models proposed for the acceleration of…
In this paper we briefly discuss the problem of the origin of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays in the framework of Top-Down models. We show that, for high energy of decays and in a wide range of spectra of injected protons, their extragalactic…
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…
If there exists the mirror world, a parallel hidden sector of particles with exactly the same microphysics as that of the observable particles, then the primordial nucleosynthesis constraints require that the temperature of the cosmic…
We review the physics of the highest energy cosmic rays. The discovery of their sources, still unknown, will reveal the most energetic astrophysical objects in the universe and could unveil new physics beyond the standard model of particle…