Cosmic Rays and Particle Physics

Fully updated for the second edition, this book introduces the growing and dynamic field of particle astrophysics. It provides an overview of high-energy nuclei, photons and neutrinos, including their origins, their propagation in the cosmos, their detection on Earth and their relation to each other. Coverage is expanded to include new content on high energy physics, the propagation of protons and nuclei in cosmic background radiation, neutrino astronomy, high-energy and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, sources and acceleration mechanisms, and atmospheric muons and neutrinos. Readers are able to master the fundamentals of particle astrophysics within the context of the most recent developments in the field. This book will benefit graduate students and established researchers alike, equipping them with the knowledge and tools needed to design and interpret their own experiments and, ultimately, to address a number of questions concerning the nature and origins of cosmic particles that have arisen in recent research.

Thomas K. Gaisser is Martin A. Pomerantz Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt prize. His research at the Bartol Research Institute in the Department of Physics and Astronomy includes cosmic ray physics, atmospheric neutrinos and neutrino astronomy.

Ralph Engel is a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, where he specialises in the development of hadronic interaction models and their application to astrophysical questions. He is the author or co-author of a number of simulation codes commonly applied in cosmic ray physics, including DPMJET, CONEX, SOFIA and Sibyll.

Elisa Resconi is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the Technische Universität München, where she focuses on the development of photosensors, the physics of neutrino oscillations and the search for neutrino point sources. She is a recipient of the Emmy-Noether grant and the Heisenberg professorship.