PeV Cosmic Rays: A Window on the Leptonic Era?

Abstract

It is shown that a variety of characteristic features of the high-energy hadronic cosmic ray spectra, in particular the abrupt changes in the spectral index that occur around 3 PeV and 300 PeV, as well as the corresponding changes in elemental composition that are evident from kinks in the $<X_{\max }>$ distribution, can be explained in great detail from interactions with relic Big Bang antineutrinos, provided that the latter have a rest mass of $\sim 0.5$ eV/$c^2$.

Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (4)

• Measurement of the rate of nu_e + d --> p + p + e^- interactions produced by 8B solar neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
• Determination of absolute neutrino masses from Z-bursts
• Absolute Neutrino Mass Determination
• On Big Bang Relics, the Neutrino Mass and the Spectrum of Cosmic Rays

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