Ultrahigh Energy Neutrinos and the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays

Abstract

It has been suggested that the characteristic energy of string models may be considerably lower than the observed Planck mass. In such schemes, the unification of interactions takes place around the string scale, perhaps as low as a few tens of TeV. Consequently, at energies above the string scale, neutrinos acquire interactions comparable in strength to strong interactions. While they can propagate through the CMBR essentially uninhibited, in interactions with nuclei in the atmosphere they induce air showers comparable to proton induced ones. We conjecture that air showers above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff in the cosmic radiation are induced by such neutrinos. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that neutrino induced "anomalous" showers are virtually indistinguishable from proton induced ones on an event-by event basis. However, given sufficient statistics in detectors (HiRes, OWL, Auger etc.), the post-GZK showers are expected to exhibit characteristics in the fluctuation pattern allowing a distinction between proton and neutrino induced showers.