Supernova remnants are widely believed to be a principal source of galactic cosmic rays, produced by diffusive shock acceleration in the environs of the remnant’s expanding shock. This review discusses recent modelling of how such energetic particles can produce gamma-rays via interactions with the remnants’ ambient interstellar medium, specifically via neutral pion decay, bremsstrahlung and in...

Cosmic-rays with energies up to 3×1020 eV have been observed. The nuclear composition of these cosmic rays is unknown but if the incident nuclei are protons then the corresponding center of mass energy is √ snn = 700 TeV. High energy muons can be used to probe the composition of these incident nuclei. The energy spectra of high-energy (> 1 TeV) cosmic ray induced muons have been measured with d...

The bulk of the cosmic rays up to about 100 TeV are thought to be accelerated by the 1st order Fermi mechanism at supernova shocks, producing a power-law spectrum. Both electrons and protons should be accelerated, but their ratio on acceleration is not well known. Recently, the EGRET instrument on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory has observed supernova remnants IC 443 and γ Cygni at GeV energi...

It has been speculated that cosmic string networks could produce ultra-high energy cosmic rays as a by-product of their evolution. By making use of recent work on the evolution of such networks, it will be shown that the flux of cosmic rays from cosmologically useful, that is GUT scale strings, is too small to be used as a test for strings with any foreseeable technology.