Declination dependence of the cosmic-ray flux at extreme energies

Abstract

We study the large-scale distribution of the arrival directions of the highest energy cosmic rays observed by various experiments. Despite clearly insufficient statistics, we find a deficit of cosmic rays at energies higher than 10^{20} eV from a large part of the sky around the celestial North Pole. We speculate on possible explanations of this feature.

5 pages, 4 figures; v2: 11 pages, 4 figures, title changed (to avoid confusion with the Southern hemisphere), analysis extended, more data included, results unchanged; to be published in JCAP

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Upper limit on the ultra-high-energy photon flux from AGASA and Yakutsk data
• A comparative study of correlations between arrival directions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and positions of their potential astrophysical sources
• Ultra-high energy cosmic ray correlations with Active Galactic Nuclei in the world dataset