Ultra high energy neutrinos the key to ultra high energy cosmic rays.pdf

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 6 0 7 5 1 5 v 3 2 6 J u l 2 0 0 6 Ultra high energy neutrinos: the key to ultra high energy cosmic rays Todor Stanev Bartol Research Institute, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, U.S.A. Abstract We discuss the relation between the acceleration spectra of extra- galactic cosmic ray protons and the luminosity and cosmological evolu- tion of their sources and the production of ultra high energy cosmogenic neutrinos in their propagation from the sources to us. 1 Introduction High energy astrophysical neutrinos are produced in hadronic reactions of accelerated nucleons and the subsequent decay of the secondary meson and muons. In astrophysical environments all mesons and muons decay, so that the generated neutrino flux indicates the energy spectrum of the accelerated nucleons and the available target density in the neutrino production site, as it does for π0 decay γ-rays. One of the best examples for this correlation is the prediction for diffuse γ-ray fluxes from the galactic plane. To fit the observations the EGRET group had to use the data on the matter density and the cosmic ray density in the galactic plane (Hunter et al. 1997). WaxmanBahcall (1999, 2001) did the same kind of calculation of the high energy neutrinos generated in extragalactic sources replacing the target density with a parameter η that describes the fraction of the accelerated 1 cosmic rays at all extragalactic sources that interact at source and generate neutrinos. The process is photoproduction interactions of the accelerated protons in the ambient photon field. One very important parameter is the cosmic ray emissivity that was estimated (Waxman 1995) to be 4.5×1044 erg/Mpc3/yr with an error of about 30%. The acceleration proton spectrum is assumed to be E?2p and the maximum proton energy is assumed to be 1021 eV. The emissivity above refers to the cosmic ray flux measured at 1019 eV, which is assumed to be of extraga