Are Neutral Goldstone Bosons Initiating Very Energetic Air Showers and Anomalous Multiple-Core Structure as a Component of Cosmic Rays?

Abstract

We consider two recently accentuated, unusual empirical results concerning cosmic-ray events at high energies. We show that the possibility for a correlated explanation is provided by new dynamics which arises from collisions of a neutral Goldstone boson as a component of the highest-energy cosmic rays.In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that there is a nearly-massless neutral Goldstone boson, b 0 , which is a component of high-energy cosmic rays and which is initiating air showers [1,2,3] at the highest energies and possibly also anomalous multiple-core structure seen in photo-emulsion chamber experiments [4, 5,6,7,8]. We point out and examine the consequences of new dynamics which arises from the assumption that there is an effective interaction originating in a neutral triangle anomaly [9,10] involving b 0 and a neutral vector boson Z ′ (and/or a chirallyrelated neutral axial vector boson). This possibility may be related to the possibility that neutrino mass originates as a consequence of a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry at a low energy scale, F < 0.4 MeV. The strength of the effective interaction is ( g 2 2π 2 F ) with g 2 assumed, for numerical illustration of the idea, to be of the order of 0.1 (i. e. like a strength for Z). Our main purpose is to clearly exhibit the relevance of the hypothesis to providing new dynamics bearing upon two long-standing puzzling aspects of cosmic-ray interactions at the highest energies. 1. The presence of a few "hadron-like" air shower events at primary energies estimated to be about 10 20 eV. [1,2] The data still is limited, but this is an energy above the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cut-off [11,12] for arrival of protons from sources at very great (cosmological) distances,The vertex arising from the triangle anomaly leads to higher-order nonrenormalizable divergences, so the model must involve effective interactions that are restrained at some high energy scale. Summing (strong) "bubble" diagrams might restrain contributions to m 2 b i. e. δm 2 b (p 2 ) ∼ (m 2 b − p 2 ) at squared four-momentum p 2 .

Physics of a sextet quark sector

“…We first proposed that the sextet threshold could be responsible for the knee some time ago [18]. In the meantime, other authors have emphasized the difficulty of explaining the knee as an effect of cosmic physics and have made various proposals [40,41,42] for a threshold effect that could be involved. That a large fraction of the crosssection (increasing as the energy increases) has to be involved, is a problem for all threshold proposals.…”