Related papers: Evading the GZK Cosmic-Ray Cutoff
The nature of the unknown sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays can be revealed through the detection of the GZK feature in the cosmic ray spectrum, resulting from the production of pions by ultra-high energy protons scattering off the…
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.…
We show that a tiny but non-zero positive cosmological constant, which has been strongly suggested by the recent astronomical observations on supernovae and CMBR, may change notably the behaviors of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray…
The origin of cosmic rays with energies higher than 10$^{20}$ eV remains a mystery. Accelerating particles up to these energies is a challenge even for the most energetic astrophysical objects known. While the isotropy in arrival directions…
The year 2007 has furnished us with outstanding results about the origin of the most energetic cosmic rays: a flux suppression as expected from the GZK-effect has been observed in the data of the HiRes and Auger experiments and correlations…
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…
Deviations from isotropy have been a key tool to identify the origin and the primary type of cosmic rays at low energies. We suggest that the Compton-Getting effect can play a similar role at ultra-high energies: If at these energies the…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cut-off provide us with a unique opportunity to understand the universe at extreme energies. Secondary GZK photons and GZK neutrinos associated with the same…
There are two main sets of data for the observed spectrum of ultra high energy cosmic rays (those cosmic rays with energies greater than $\sim 4 \times 10^{18}$ eV), the High Resolution Fly's Eye (HiRes) collaboration group observations,…
High-energy cosmic-ray electrons reveal some remarkable spectral features, the most noteworthy of which is the rise in the positron fraction above 10~GeV. Due to strong energy loss during propagation, these particles can reach Earth only…
The whole spectrum of high-energy cosmic ray (HECR) is, very likely, influenced by tachyonic neutrinos. Especially, the appearance of two knees can be fitted by the tachyon mass $m(\nu_e)=m(\nu_\mu)\simeq 0.51$ eV/$c^2$ as predicted by a…
Most models of the origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays rely on the existence of luminous extragalactic sources. Cosmic rays escaping the galaxy where the source is located produce a sufficiently large electric current to justify the…
We consider the modification of extragalactic cosmic ray spectrum caused by cosmic ray interactions with infrared background photons which are present in the extragalactic space together with relic photons. It is assumed that cosmic ray…
We consider the possibility that ultra-high energy cosmic rays originate from the annihilation of relic superheavy dark-matter particles. We find that a cross section of <sigma_A v> ~ 10^{-26}cm^2 (M_X/10^{12}GeV)^{3/2} is required to…
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…
Ultra-high cosmic rays (UHECRs) with energies >10^19 eV emitted at cosmological distances will be attenuated by cosmic microwave and infrared background radiation through photohadronic processes. Lower energy extra-galactic cosmic rays…
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…
Observations of cosmic rays have been improved at all energies, both in terms of higher statistics and reduced systematics. As a result, the all particle cosmic ray energy spectrum starts to exhibit more structures than could be seen…
The decay of very heavy metastable relics of the Early Universe can produce ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) in the halo of our own Galaxy. On distance scales of the order of the halo size, energy losses are negligible---no…
It is difficult for conventional sources to accelerate cosmic ray particles to the highest energies that have been observed. Topological defects such as monopoles and strings overcome this difficulty, because their natural energy scale is…