Date: Wednesday 21st November 2001
Title: Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays and New Physics
Speaker: Dr. Subir Sarkar (Oxford)
Abstract
The possibility that the Fermi scale is the only fundamental energy scale
of Nature is under serious consideration at present, yet cosmic rays may
already have provided direct evidence of new physics at a much higher
energy scale. The recently detected ultra high energy particles beyond the
Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff may originate from the slow decays of
massive relic particles clustered in the halo of our Galaxy. Such
particles had been predicted to exist beforehand with mass and lifetime in
the range required to explain the observations. I will discuss recent work
focussing on experimental tests of this speculative but exciting idea.