Halo Dark Matter and Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays

Abstract

The decay of very heavy metastable relics of the Early Universe can produce ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) in the halo of our own Galaxy. On distance scales of the order of the halo size, energy losses are negligible---no Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff is expected. In this letter we show that, as a consequence of the hierarchical build up of the halo, this scenario predicts the existence of small scale anisotropies in the arrival directions of UHECRs. We also suggest some consequences of this scenario which will be testable with upcoming experiments, as Auger.

arXiv comment9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for Publication in Phys. Lett. B

References in corpus (10)

• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• Small-scale anisotropy of cosmic rays above 10^19eV observed with the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array
• Ultra-high energy cosmic rays without GZK cutoff
• Nonthermal Supermassive Dark Matter
• Extremely high energy cosmic rays from relic particle decays
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• Signatures of Topological Defects
• Dark matter halos and the anisotropy of ultra-high energy cosmic rays
• Anisotropy of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays in the Dark Matter Halo Model
• Gamma Rays from Superheavy Relic Particles in the Halo

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• Signatures of Hierarchical Clustering in Dark Matter Detection Experiments
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• Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: The Annihilation of Super-Heavy Relics
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