The Cosmic-Ray Knee: Still a Mystery

Physics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

There are several questions concerning the cosmic-ray knee. The first concerns its sharpness. Recent measurements estimate that it takes only about a half decade in energy to fully transit the knee while almost all propagation models require nearly two decades to accomplish this. The second is the general tendency of the composition to trend towards protons as the knee is approached from below and then abruptly trend toward a heavier composition up on crossing the knee. We have proposed a two-comp onent source model combined with the onset of a new interaction at 3 × 1015 ev which explains these phenomena. However, data from HiRes indicate a trend back towards protons at yet higher energy which our model cannot explain without extension. Furthermore, if the HiRes data turns out to show the GZK cutoff at the expected energy it will demonstrate that there is either no energy-losing interaction taking place or that it has become insignificant at these energies. Finally, we note here that an explanation of the knee as the successive loss of particles of increasingly higher Z has serious problems as well.

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