Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1997-09-18
Phys.Atom.Nucl.61:1028-1030,1998
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
6 pages, no figures, LaTeX file. Talk at International Workshops 'Beyond the Desert', Castle Ringberg, Tegernsee, June 8-15, 1
Scientific paper
We conjecture that the highest energy cosmic rays beyond the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cut-off may provide a unique window into the very early epoch of the Universe, namely, that of reheating after inflation, provided these cosmic rays are due to decays of parent superheavy long-living X-particles. These particles may constitute a considerable fraction of cold dark matter in the Universe. We argue that the unconventionally long lifetime of the superheavy particles, which should be in the range of $10^{10} - 10^{22}$ years, might require novel particle physics mechanisms of their decays, such as instantons. We propose a toy model illustrating the instanton scenario. Generic expected features of ultra-high energy extensive air showers in our scenario are similar to those of other top-down scenarios. However, some properties of the upper part of the cosmic ray spectrum make the instanton scenario distinguishable, at least in principle, from other ones.
Kuzmin Andrei V.
Rubakov Valerii A.
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