Related papers: Observing Air Showers from Cosmic Superluminal Par…
The radio technique for the detection of cosmic particles has seen a major revival in recent years. New and planned experiments in the lab and the field, such as GLUE, Anita, LUNASKA, Codalema, LOPES as well as sophisticated Monte Carlo…
Extensive air showers are the result of billions of particle reactions initiated by single cosmic rays at ultra-high energy. Their characteristics are sensitive both to the mass of the primary cosmic ray and to the fine details of hadronic…
As a basic symmetry of space-time, Lorentz symmetry has played important roles in various fields of physics, and it is a glamorous question whether Lorentz symmetry breaks. Since Einstein proposed special relativity, Lorentz symmetry has…
A fundamental presupposition of modern cosmology is the Copernican Principle; that we are not in a central, or otherwise special region of the Universe. Studies of Type Ia supernovae, together with the Copernican Principle, have led to the…
We discuss the implications of a recently proposed pattern of Lorentz symmetry violation on very high-energy cross sections. As a consequence of the breaking of local Lorentz invariance by the introduction of a fundamental length, $a$ , the…
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an…
Most embeddings of the Standard Model into a more unified theory, in particular the ones based on supergravity or superstrings, predict the existence of a hidden sector of particles which have only very weak interactions with the visible…
We explore particle physics beyond accelerator energies, motivated by questions exposed in astroparticle physics observations: 1) Are there reasonable modifications to the standard extrapolations of LHC-tuned hadronic interaction models, so…
In present work we examine the implications on both, space-time measures and causal structure, of a generalization of the local causality postulate by asserting its validity to all motion regimes, the subluminal and superluminal ones. The…
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting…
Special relativity has been tested at low energy with great accuracy, but its extrapolation to very high-energy phenomena is much less well established. Introducing a critical distance scale, a , below 10E-25 cm (the wavelength scale of the…
Any theory invoked to explain cosmic acceleration predicts consistency relations between the expansion history, structure growth, and all related observables. Currently there exist high-quality measurements of the expansion history from…
The discovery of the Higgs boson marks a key ingredient to establish the electroweak structure of the Standard Model. Its non-abelian gauge structure gives rise to, yet unobserved, non-perturbative baryon and lepton number violating…
A forefront area of research concerns the exploration of the properties of hadronic matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density, and the determination of the equation of state--the relation between pressure, temperature and…
Measurements of cosmic ray particles at energies above E = 5 x 10^{14} eV are performed by large area ground based air shower experiments. Only they provide the collection power required for obtaining sufficient statistics at the low flux…
The equivalence principle, that is one of the main pillars of general relativity, is very well tested in the Solar system; however, its validity is more uncertain on cosmological scales, or when dark matter is concerned. This article shows…
Recently the HEAT balloon experiment has confirmed an excess of high-energy positrons in cosmic rays. They could come from annihilation of dark matter in the galactic halo. We discuss expectations for the positron signal in cosmic rays from…
We consider a theory with isotropic nonbirefringent Lorentz violation in the photon sector and explore the effects on the development of the electromagnetic component of extensive air showers in the Earth atmosphere. Specifically, we…
The Pierre Auger Observatory has been designed to investigate the most energetic particles known, the ultra high energy cosmic rays. The observatory, covering an area of 3000 km^2, combines two different detection techniques to study the…
Very high energy gamma-ray astronomy based on the measurement of air shower particles at ground-level has only recently been established as a viable approach, complementing the well established air Cherenkov technique. This approach…