Related papers: Loop Quantum Gravity Effects on the High Energy Co…
Seven and a half years of continuous monitoring of giant air showers triggered by ultra high-energy cosmic rays have been recently summarized by the AGASA collaboration. The resulting energy spectrum indicates clearly that the cosmic ray…
Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that produce giant extensive showers of charged particles and photons when they interact in the Earth's atmosphere provide a unique tool to search for new physics. Of particular interest is the possibility of…
Over the last 30 years or so, a handful of events observed in ground-based cosmic ray detectors seem to have opened a new window in the field of high-energy astrophysics. These events have energies exceeding 5x10**19 eV (the region of the…
In recent years several ideas for experimental searches of effects induced by quantum properties of space-time have been discussed. Some of these ideas concern the role in quantum spacetime of the ordinary Lorentz symmetry of classical flat…
High-energy end of the cosmic-ray spectrum has provided us to check a validity of the Lorentz Invariance and the Relativity principle, through the observation of the so-called GZK cut-off. It is claimed in this report that the comoving…
Some models for quantum gravity (QG) violate Lorentz invariance and predict an energy dependence of the speed of light, leading to a dispersion of high-energy gamma-ray signals that travel over cosmological distances. Limits on the…
The energy spectrum, composition and arrival directions of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) with energy above the cosmic ray ankle, measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory, are inconsistent if their origin is assumed to be…
Observations of cosmic rays with energies above ~ 4 x 10^{10} GeV have inspired several speculative suggestions concerning their origin. The crucial question is whether or not the spectrum exhibits the expected `GZK cutoff' at this energy…
Recent observations of ultra high energy cosmic rays and gamma rays suggest that there are small violations of Lorentz symmetry. If there were no such violations, then the GZK cut off would hold and cosmic rays with energy $\sim 10^{20}eV$…
Possible extragalactic sources of cosmic rays at energies above 4*10^{19} eV detected with the Yakutsk array are sought. Correlation of the shower arrival directions with objects from Veron's catalog that are located closer than 100 Mpc…
The Ultra-high energy cosmic ray energy spectrum summarized by the AGASA collaboration indicates clearly that the cosmic ray spectrum extends well beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cut-off at \sim 5 x 10^19 eV. Furthermore, despite…
We explore the consequences of loop quantum cosmology (inverse-volume corrections) in the spectrum of the gravitational waves using the method of the Bogoliubov coefficients. These corrections are taken into account at the background level…
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…
The detection of cosmic rays with energy around and in excess of $10^{20}$ eV raises many questions that future experiments will help answering to. I address here my view of some of these open issues, as they are now and as they might be…
Tiny Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) effects, potentially arising from quantum gravity-induced spacetime structures, may also manifest in the proton sector, offering a plausible pathway to test Planck-scale physics through high-energy…
It has been speculated that the recently detected ultra-high energy cosmic rays may originate from the decays of relic particles with mass of order $10^{12}$ GeV clustered in the halo of our Galaxy. This hypothesis can be tested through…
There has been much interest in possible violations of Lorentz invariance, particularly motivated by quantum gravity theories. It has been suggested that a small amount of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) could turn off photomeson…
Quantum-gravity effects may introduce relevant consequences for the propagation and interaction of high energy cosmic rays particles. Assuming the space-time foamy structure results in an intrinsic uncertainty of energy and momentum of…
Contrary to expectations, several cosmic ray events with energies above $10^{20}$ eV have been observed. The flux of such events is well above the predicted Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff due to the pion production (via the $\Delta$…
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…