On Big Bang Relics, the Neutrino Mass and the Cosmic Ray Spectrum

Abstract

It is shown that high energy features of the cosmic ray spectrum, in particular the kink around 4 PeV and the corresponding change in spectral index, may be explained from interactions between highly energetic protons and relic Big Bang antineutrinos, if the latter have a rest mass of about 0.4 eV/$c^2$. This explanation is supported by experimental data from extensive air-shower experiments.

4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PRL

References in corpus (1)

• Cosmic Ray Neutrino Annihilation on Relic Neutrinos Revisited: A Mechanism for Generating Air Showers above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin Cut-off

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Cosmic Rays and Particle Physics
• PeV Cosmic Rays: A Window on the Leptonic Era?
• Detection of cosmic neutrino clustering by cosmic ray spectra
• Methods of Determination of the Energy and Mass of Primary Cosmic Ray Particles at Extensive Air Shower Energies