2000/06/28 by G. Domokos, Domokos, G., S. Kovesi-Domokos +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0006328
LaTeX 2e, 12 pages with 2 eps figures. Uses epsf.tex
arxiv created 2000/06/28 · openalex publication_date 2000/06/28 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has been suggested that the characteristic energy of string models may be considerably lower than the observed Planck mass. In such schemes, the unification of interactions takes place around the string scale, perhaps as low as a few tens of TeV. Consequently, at energies above the string scale, neutrinos acquire interactions comparable in strength to strong interactions. While they can propagate through the CMBR essentially uninhibited, in interactions with nuclei in the atmosphere they induce air showers comparable to proton induced ones. We conjecture that air showers above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff in the cosmic radiation are induced by such neutrinos. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that neutrino induced "anomalous" showers are virtually indistinguishable from proton induced ones on an event-by event basis. However, given sufficient statistics in detectors (HiRes, OWL, Auger etc.), the post-GZK showers are expected to exhibit characteristics in the fluctuation pattern allowing a distinction between proton and neutrino induced showers.