Non-extensivity Effects and the Highest Energy Cosmic Ray Affair

Abstract

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background confirm that it is described by a Planckian distribution with high precision. It is non-extensivity bounded to be less than some parts in $10^5$, or to some parts in $10^4$ at most. This deviation may appear minuscule, but may have a non-negligible effect on a particle propagating through this background over the course of millions of years. In this paper we analyze the possible influence of such a slight deviation upon the propagation of nuclei and protons of ultra-high energy. These particles interact via photopion and photodisintegration processes which we examine taking into account a slight non-extensive background. We show that such a deviation does not exhibit a significant difference in the energy attenuation length of extremely high energy cosmic rays.

Revised version, improvements per referee's suggestions

References in corpus (5)

• Testing the Correlation of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with High Redshift Sources
• Chaos and Universality in the Dynamics of Inflationary Cosmologies
• Quantal distribution functions in non-extensive statistics and an early universe test revisited
• Muons from strangelets
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Astrophysical Origins of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays
• Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays: The state of the art before the Auger Observatory
• Statistical mechanics and the description of the early universe I.: Foundations for a slightly non-extensive cosmology