Ultra high energy neutrinos: the key to ultra high energy cosmic rays

We discuss the relation between the acceleration spectra of extragalactic cosmic ray protons and the luminosity and cosmological evolution of their sources and the production of ultra high energy cosmogenic neutrinos in their propagation from the sources to us.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Talk presented at the Vulcano06 workshop. Second version with some typos remove

The beginning of cosmic ray astronomy

We discuss the anisotropic arrival directions of the ultra high energy cosmic rays detected by Auger which I consider one of the biggest discoverie in astrophysics during the last year.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Concluding remarks at the Vulcano2008 worksho

Status, performance, and first results of the IceTop array

We describe the design and performance of IceTop, the air shower array on top of the IceCube neutrino detector. After the 2008/09 antarctic summer season both detectors are deployed at almost 3/4 of their design size. With the current IceTop 59 stations we can start the study of showers of energy well above 10$^{17}$ eV. The paper also describes the first results from IceTop and our plans to study the cosmic ray composition using several different types of analysis.Comment: ^ pages, 6 figures, submitted to the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions, Paris, 200

Correlation of the HIghest Energy Cosmic Rays with the Supergalactic Plane

We examine the anisotropy of the arrival directions of twenty seven ultra high energy cosmic rays detected by the Pierre Auger Collaboration. We confirm the anisotropy of the arrival directions of these events and find a significant correlation with the updated definition of the supergalactic plane at distances up to 70 Mpc, A Monte Carlo calculation of isotropic source distribution suggests a chance probability for isotropic event arrival direction distribution of 2-6$\times10^{-4}$.Comment: 3 pages, 2 postscript figures. Revised version has a different title and extended discussion of the corrlations with different astrophysical object

Ultra high energy cosmic rays: A review

We present the main results on the energy spectrum and composition of the highest energy cosmic rays of energy exceeding 10$^{18}$ eV obtained by the High Resolution Fly's Eye and the Southern Auger Observatory. The current results are somewhat contradictory and raise interesting questions about the origin and character of these particles.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, presented at the 2010 Vulcano workshop, Vulcano, Ital

Time-reversal symmetry breaking state in dirty three-band superconductor

I study the effects of disorder on the superconductivity of a three-band model with repulsive interband pairing. Such a model can support several possible superconducting order parameters, including a complex time-reversal symmetry breaking (TRSB) state. Impurity scattering suppresses the critical temperature of all these states, but the complex state survives, and remains a part of the phase diagram of the model even in the presence of moderate amount of disorder. This means that the TRSB states could be experimentally accessible in multiband materials like iron pnictides and chalcogenides.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, invited paper in Focus on Multicomponent Superconductivity, special issue of Superconductor Science and Technolog

The transition from galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays

We discuss the region of transition between galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays. The exact shapes and compositions of these two components contains information about important parameters of powerful astrophysical sources and the conditions in extragalactic space. Several types of experimental data, including the exact shape of the ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, their chemical composition and their anisotropy, and the fluxes of cosmogenic neutrinos have to be included in the solution of this problem.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, written in LaTeX, to be published in the Proceedings of the NOW 2006 worksho

Ultra high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos after Auger

We discuss the main results that were recently published by the Auger Collaboration and their impact on our knowledge of the ultra high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Talk at the Vulcano 2008 meeting "Frontier objects in astrophysics and particle physics", Vulcano, Ital

The IceTop experiment in 2010

We present the current status of the IceTop air shower array on top of the IceCube neutrino detector that IceTop can use as a huge detector of TeV muons. We laos give a brief discussion of different types of air shower events that contain information on the spectrum and composition of the cosmic rays in a wide energy range.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, presented at the Vulcano 2010 workshop, Vulcano, Ital

Atmospheric neutrino challenges

We briefly review the improvements in the predictions of atmospheric neutrino fluxes since the NOW2000 workshop. In spite of the great progress in calculational technique the predictions are still not exact because of the uncertainties in the two major sets of input - cosmic ray flux and hadronic interactions on light nuclei.Comment: 6 pages, 7 postscript figures, prepared for the NOW 2004 Proceeding