Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays
A special issue of Universe (ISSN 2218-1997). This special issue belongs to the section "High Energy Nuclear and Particle Physics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024 | Viewed by 810
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are particles from the Universe with energies above 1 EeV (1018 eV),extending up to beyond 100 EeV. These energies are much higher than those achieved by human-made accelerators. Such high energy particles, subsequently, are important probes to study acceleration physics, particle physics, and new physics beyond the standard models. However, how and where those particles are accelerated to such high energies still remains a mystery, even 60 years after they were discovered. As UHECRs travel to Earth, their paths are altered by magnetic fields, causing the observed UHECR directions to deviate from the directions of their sources. This discrepancy presents a challenge in pinpointing the origins of these cosmic rays. Decades of experimental and theoretical work have been dedicated to exploring this phenomenon. The world’s largest UHECR observatories, the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) and the Telescope Array (TA) experiments, have been measuring the spectrum, composition, and anisotropy of UHECRs for over a decade, providing us with more and more information to uncover the origin and acceleration mechanism of UHECRs. The development of next-generation experiments, such as the Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) project and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), would further increase the statistics of observed UHECRs. Furthermore, the progress in multi-messenger astronomy enriches our knowledge further on features of source candidates, the extra-galactic background light, and the intergalactic and galactic magnetic field, developing our understanding of the acceleration and escape of UHECRs in the source, and their propagation from the source to Earth. This marks an exciting time, bringing us closer to understanding this scientific marvel.
The aim of this Special Issue is to collect the current knowledge from theories and observations on the physics of UHECRs and their source candidates, understanding our position in relation to, and what kind of efforts are needed to solve, this 60-year-old mystery.
Dr. Haoning He
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- high energy neutrino
- high energy gamma-ray
- ultra-high-energy cosmic rays
- particle acceleration
- hadronic interactions
- anisotropy
- composition
- multi-messenger astronomy
- magnetic fields
- Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs)
- galaxy clusters
- Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN)
- Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs)
- radio galaxies
- starburst galaxies
- pulsars
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Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Radio Detection of UHE Cosmic Rays and Neutrinos off the Moon with Two 30m Telescopes
Author: Chen
Highlights: 1. Propose an experiment to detect the UHE particles for longer time far more than the present experiments with two 30-mtere telescopes
2. Analyze the aperture, flux and event rate of the proposed experiment, the results show the detectability of the UHE cosmic rays and neutrinos.
Title: μPPET: J-PET scintillators to investigate the muon-puzzle
Authors: A. Porcelli; P. Moskal; N. Protiti
Affiliation: Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi—Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche “Enrico Fermi”, Via Panisperna, 89a, 00184 Roma, Italy
Abstract: The Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) present a challenge when the density of the muon on the ground is measured. That is the so-called muon puzzle.
μPPET is a project aiming to investigate the source of it via the muon trajectory, under the hypothesis of a correlation with the spin puzzle: polarized particles change the trajectories of the scattered charged particles. For investigating the hypothesis, the experiment restricts itself to a High-Energy Cosmic Rays (HECR) region, where energy and mass composition are well known, reducing the unknown variables in this way. The muon puzzle is known to be unobserved in HECR; however, if the hypothesis is valid, it is not absent but negligibly in the counts of the muon. Hence, the muon trajectory will still present discrepancies from the null hypothesis.
To achieve the goal, the two J-PETs from the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland) are used: one as a tracker for the muon trajectories, and the other dismantled in its scintillator components to form an array able to reconstruct the primary particle direction. In this work, the J-PETs are presented.
