Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays: Facts, Myths, and Legends
Luis Alfredo Anchordoqui

TL;DR
This paper reviews recent progress in understanding ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, covering experimental data, acceleration mechanisms, neutrino production, air shower phenomenology, and potential for new physics insights.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of current knowledge, experimental techniques, and theoretical models related to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays and their associated phenomena.
Findings
Progress in understanding cosmic ray energy spectrum and composition
Development of models for air shower physics and hadronic interactions
Potential to explore new physics beyond the electroweak scale
Abstract
This is a written version of a series of lectures aimed at graduate students in astrophysics/particle theory/particle experiment. In the first part, we explain the important progress made in recent years towards understanding the experimental data on cosmic rays with energies > 10^8 GeV. We begin with a brief survey of the available data, including a description of the energy spectrum, mass composition, and arrival directions. At this point we also give a short overview of experimental techniques. After that, we introduce the fundamentals of acceleration and propagation in order to discuss the conjectured nearby cosmic ray sources, and emphasize some of the prospects for a new (multi-particle) astronomy. Next, we survey the state of the art regarding the ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos which should be produced in association with the observed cosmic rays. In the second part, we…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena · Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies · Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena
