2001/11/09 by A. Ringwald, Ringwald, A.
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #astro-ph #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0111112
8 pages, 11 figures, needs icrc.cls (included). Invited so-called "Highlight Talk", to appear in the Proceedings of the 27th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2001), Hamburg, Germany, August 2001
arxiv created 2001/11/09 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Recently the possibility was widely discussed that a large fraction of the highest energy cosmic rays may be decay products of Z bosons which were produced in the resonant annihilation of ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos on cosmological relic neutrinos. If one takes this so-called Z-burst scenario seriously, one may infer the mass of the heaviest relic neutrino as well as the necessary ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrino flux from a comparison of the predicted Z-burst spectrum with the observed cosmic ray spectrum.