No Arabic abstract
I have shown that if we assume that the Standard Model of particle physics and Feynman-Weinberg quantum gravity holds at all times, then in the very early universe, the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) cannot couple to right handed electrons and quarks. If this property of CBR has persisted to the present day, the Ultra HIgh Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) can propagate a factor of ten further than they could if the CBR were an electromagnetic field, since most of the cross section for pion production when a UHECR hits a CBR photon is due to a quark spin flip, and such a flip cannot occur if the CBR photon cannot couple to right handed quarks. The GZM effect will still reduce the number of UHECR, but UHECR can arrive from a distance of a redshift of up to $z=0.1$. I show that taking this additional propagation distance into account allows us to identify the sources of 4 of the 6 UHECR which the Pierre Auger Collaboration could not identify, and also identify the source of the 320 EeV UHECR seen by the Flys Eye instrument. I suggest an experiment to test this hypothesis about the CBR.
Tipler has shown that if we assume that the particle physics Standard Model and DeWitt-Wheeler quantum gravity (equivalent to Feynman-Weinberg quantum gravity) are a Theory of Everything, then in the very early universe, the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) could not have coupled to right handed electrons and quarks. Tipler further showed that if this property of CBR has continued, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect would be observed to be too low by a factor of two. WMAP and PLANCK observed this. Tipler showed that this CBR property would also mean the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) would propagate a factor of ten further than standard theory predicts, since most of the cross section for pion production when a UHECR hits a CBR photon is due to a quark spin flip, and such a flip cannot occur if a CBR particle cannot couple to right-handed quarks. We show that taking this additional propagation distance into account allows us to identify the sources of 86% of the UHECR seen by the Pierre Auger Collaboration. We can also identify the sources of 9 of the 11 UHECR seen by the AGASA observatory, and the source of the 320 EeV UHECR seen by the Flys Eye instrument. We propose observations to test the theory underlying the UHECR identifications, beginning with measuring the redshifts of five galaxies whose apparent visual magnitude we estimate to be about 15, and whose positions we give to within one arcsecond. The particle physics Standard Model identifies the Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
Relativistic Invariance might be modified by Quantum Gravity effects. The interesting point which emerged in the last fifteen years is that remnants of possible Lorentz Invariance Violations could be present at energies much lower than their natural scale, and possibly affect Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays phenomena. We discuss their status in the view of recent data from the Pierre Auger Observatory.
The very low statistics of cosmic rays above the knee region make their study possible only through the detection of the extensive air showers (EAS) produced by their interaction with the constituents of the atmosphere. The Pierre Auger Observatory located in Argentina is the largest high energy cosmic-ray detection array in the world, composed of fluorescence telescopes, particle detectors on the ground and radio antennas. The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is composed of 153 autonomous radio stations that sample the radio emission of the extensive air showers in the 30 MHz to 80 MHz frequency range. It covers a surface of 17 km$^2$, has a 2$pi$ sensitivity to arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) and provides a duty cycle close to 100%. The electric field emitted by the secondary particles of an air shower is highly correlated to the primary cosmic ray characteristics like energy and mass, and the emission mechanisms are meanwhile well understood. In this contribution, recent progress on the reconstruction of the mass composition and energy measurements with AERA will be presented.
This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories, of which the first was quantum electrodynamics, describing the interactions of electrons with light. This was later incorporated into the electroweak theory, describing electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions. The standard model also includes quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. The final capstone of the model was the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 at CERN. But the model is very far from being the last word; there are still many gaps in our understanding.
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is used to detect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. These observations are compared to the data of the surface detector stations of the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-ray energies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30 to 80 MHz regime has been thoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energy deposit per area is determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated using a two-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due to interference between the geomagnetic and charge-excess emission components. The spatial integral over the signal distribution gives a direct measurement of the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in the AERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air shower arriving perpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy -- corrected for geometrical effects -- is used as a cosmic-ray energy estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the surface-detector information, we observe that this radio-energy estimator scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy as expected for coherent emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for the data set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at least five radio stations with signal.