paper

High-energy Cosmic Rays and Neutrinos from Semi-relativistic Hypernovae

arXiv:0705.0027 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.76.083009

Abstract

The origin of the ultrahigh-energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CRs) from the second knee (eV) above in the CR spectrum is still unknown. Recently, there has been growing evidence that a peculiar type of supernovae, called hypernovae, are associated with sub-energetic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), such as SN1998bw/GRB980425 and SN2003lw/GRB031203. Such hypernovae appear to have high (up to mildly relativistic) velocity ejecta, which may be linked to the sub-energetic GRBs. Assuming a continuous distribution of the kinetic energy of the hypernova ejecta as a function of its velocity with , we find that 1) the external shock wave produced by the high velocity ejecta of a hypernova can accelerate protons up to energies as high as ; 2) the cosmological hypernova rate is sufficient to account for the energy flux above the second knee; and 3) the steeper spectrum of CRs at these energies can arise in these sources. In addition, hypernovae would also give rise to a faint diffuse UHE neutrino flux, due to interactions of the UHE CRs with hypernova optical-UV photons.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D, 6 revtex pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (40)

Cited by in corpus (89)