Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Ultra-high energy cosmic rays, cosmological con...

Electronic data

  • PhysRevLett

    Rights statement: © 2003 The American Physical Society

    Final published version, 89.4 KB, PDF document

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Ultra-high energy cosmic rays, cosmological constant, and $θ$-vacua

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
Close
Article number191301
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>13/01/2003
<mark>Journal</mark>Physical review letters
Issue number19
Volume90
Number of pages4
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We propose that the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays beyond the GZK cutoff and the origin of small cosmological constant can both be explained by vacuum tunneling effects in a theory with degenerate vacua and fermionic doublets. By considering the possibility of tunneling from a particular winding number state, accompanied by violation of some global quantum number of fermions, the small value of the vacuum dark energy and the production of high energy cosmic rays are shown to be related. We predict that the energy of such cosmic rays should be at least $5\times 10^{14}$ GeV.

Bibliographic note

ReVTeX, 4 pages, reference added. This version to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett