We obtain the horizontal air shower rate from the (EeV) high energy neutrino flux predicted in some topological defect scenarios as the source for the highest energy cosmic rays. Emphasis is made on the different character of the events depending on the neutrino flavor an type of interaction. We show that the bound for muon poor showers in the 105 − 107 GeV energy range is violated by maximal p...

We apply a wind model, driven by combined cosmic-ray and thermal-gas pressure, to the Milky Way, and show that the observed Galactic diffuse soft X-ray emission can be better explained by a wind than by previous static gas models. We find that cosmic-ray pressure is essential to driving the observed wind. Having thus defined a “best-fit” model for a Galactic wind, we explore variations in the b...

The origin of ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays is still an open question. In the present work, we searched the possible UHE cosmic ray sources using the MAGIC telescope for the associated very high energy (VHE) gamma ray emission. Due to constrained propagation distance of such cosmic rays, we selected nearby galaxies in vicinity of the direction of the AGASA triplet and a HiRes UHE cosmic r...

Recent measurements of cosmic ray spectra of several individual nuclear species by the CREAM, TRACER and ATIC experiments indicate a change in the spectral index of the power laws at TeV energies. Possible explanations among others include non-linear diffusive shock acceleration of cosmic rays, different cosmic ray propagation properties at higher and lower energies in the Galaxy and the presen...

Centaurus A, the cosmic ray accelerator a few Mpc away from us is possibly one of the nearest sources of extremely high energy cosmic rays. We investigate whether the gamma ray data currently available from Centaurus A in the GeV-TeV energy band can be explained with only proton proton interactions. We show that for a single power law proton spectrum, mechanisms of γ-ray production other than p...

Centaurus A, the cosmic ray accelerator a few Mpc away from us is possibly one of the nearest sources of extremely high energy cosmic rays. We investigate whether the gamma ray data currently available from Centaurus A in the GeV-TeV energy band can be explained with only proton proton interactions. We show that for a single power law proton spectrum, mechanisms of γ-ray production other than p...

The existence of the spectral break around ∼ 3 × 10 eV in the cosmic ray spectrum (referred to as the ‘knee’) is one of the biggest questions in cosmic ray astrophysics. At the same time, the origin of cosmic rays above the knee energies (between 10 and 10 eV) is also still unsettled. In this paper, we investigate how the hypothetical extragalactic CRs after modulated by the galactic wind contr...

Nonthermal particles can be produced due to incomplete thermalization at collisionless shocks and further accelerated to very high energies via diffusive shock acceleration. In a previous study we explored the cosmic ray (CR) acceleration at cosmic shocks through numerical simulations of CR modified, quasi-parallel shocks in 1D plane-parallel geometry with the physical parameters relevant for t...

In the following we describe recent progress in our understanding of the origin of cosmic rays. We propose that cosmic rays originate mainly in three sites, a) normal supernova explosions into the interstellar medium, b) supernova explosions into stellar winds, and c) hot spots of powerful radio galaxies. The proposal depends on an assumption about the scaling of the turbulent diiusive transpor...

191301-1 We propose that the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff and the origin of small cosmological constant can both be explained by vacuum tunneling effects in a theory with degenerate vacua and fermionic doublets. By considering the possibility of tunneling from a particular winding number state, accompanied by violation of some global quantum n...