Related papers: Loop Quantum Gravity Effects on the High Energy Co…
Special relativity has been tested at low energy with great accuracy, but these results cannot be extrapolated to very high-energy phenomena: this new domain of physics may actually provide the key to the, yet unsettled, question of the…
Almost half a century ago, Greisen, Zatsepin and Kuz'min (GZK) predicted a "cosmologically meaningful termination" of the spectrum of cosmic rays at energies around $10^{20}$ eV due to their interaction with the cosmic microwave background,…
We address some current theoretical issues around ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We recall that scenarios producing more gamma-rays than cosmic rays up to high redshift can in general only provide a sub-dominant contribution to the…
Multidimensional modification of gravity with a smaller mass scale of the gravitational interaction is considered. Stable by assumption dark matter particles could decay via interactions with virtual black holes. The decay rates of such…
We have proposed that the cosmic ray spectrum "knee", the steepening of the cosmic ray spectrum at energy $E \gsim 10^{15.5}$ eV, is due to "new physics", namely new interactions at TeV cm energies which produce particles undetected by the…
It has been suggested that cosmological gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can produce the observed flux of cosmic rays at the highest energies. However, recent studies of GRBs indicate that their redshift distribution likely follows that of the…
Cosmic rays have been observed up to energies $10^8$ times larger than those of the best particle accelerators. Studies of astrophysical particles (hadrons, neutrinos and photons) at their highest observed energies have implications for…
Although cosmic rays were discovered 90 years ago, we do not know how and where they are accelerated. There is compelling evidence that the highest energy cosmic rays are extra-galactic -- they cannot be contained by our galaxy's magnetic…
The origin of the highest energy cosmic rays represents one of the most conspicuous enigmas of modern astrophysics, in spite of gigantic experimental efforts in the past fifty years, and of active theoretical research. The past decade has…
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…
Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory are presented, focusing on a measurement of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum above 10^18 eV, cosmic-ray composition, and the anisotropy in the cosmic ray arrival directions. The flux of cosmic…
Ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CRs) of energies $\sim (10^{18}-10^{20})~{\rm eV}$, accelerated in violent astrophysical environments, interact with cosmic background radiation fields via photo-hadronic processes, leading to strong…
Contrary to earlier expectations, several cosmic ray events with energies above $10^{20}$ eV have been reported by a number of ultra-high energy cosmic ray observatories. According to the AGASA experiment, the flux of such events is well…
This is a review of neutrino astronomy anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of $10^{20}$ and $10^{13}$ eV, respectively. Although the discovery of cosmic rays dates back close…
One of the principal aspects through which the effects of quantum gravity are hoped to manifest is the possible modification of the dispersion relation for electromagnetic (e-m) waves. By combining (i) the symmetry reduced approaches to…
In this paper we will discuss the problem of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) and show that the idea of a Single Source Model established by Erlykin and Wolfendale (1997) to explain the features seen in cosmic ray energy spectra around…
We compute the ultra-high energy cosmic ray horizon, i.e. the distance up to which cosmic ray sources may significantly contribute to the fluxes above a certain threshold on the observed energies. We obtain results both for proton and heavy…
Cosmic rays with energies above $10^{18}$ eV are currently of considerable interest in astrophysics and are to be further studied in a number of projects which are either currently under construction or the subject of well-developed…
The spectrum of extra-galactic cosmic rays (CRs) is expected to follow the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff at about 5x10^10 GeV which results from energy losses of charged nuclei in the cosmic microwave background. So far the…
We give a brief overview of the current experimental and theoretical status of cosmic rays above ~10**17 eV. We focus on the role of large scale magnetic fields and on multi-messenger aspects linking charged cosmic ray with secondary…