2006/03/21 by Sascha Bornhauser, Manuel Drees
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic ray #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Higgsino #Neutralino #Neutrino #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2006.09.002
published as Astropart.Phys.27:30-45,2007 · 28 pages, 11 figures
arxiv created 2006/03/21 · openalex publication_date 2006/10/05 · arxiv updated 2011/05/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The origin of the most energetic cosmic ray events, with E \gsim 1020 eV, remains mysterious. One possibility is that they are produced in the decay of very massive, long--lived particles. It has been suggested that these so--called ``top--down scenarios'' can be tested by searching for ultrarelativistic neutralinos, which would be produced copiously if superparticles exist at or near the TeV scale. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of the interactions of such neutralinos with ordinary matter. To this end we compute several new contributions to the total interaction cross section; in particular, the case of higgsino--like neutralinos is treated for the first time. We also carefully solve the transport equations. We show that a semi--analytical solution that has been used in the literature to treat the somewhat analogous propagation of τ neutrinos leads to large errors; we therefore use a straightforward numerical method to solve these integro--differential equations.