International Journal of Modern Physics A

In this review we discuss the important progress made in recent years towards understanding the experimental data on cosmic rays with energies ≳ 10¹⁹ eV. We begin with a brief survey of the available data, including a description of the energy spectrum, mass composition, and arrival directions. At this point we also give a short overview of experimental techniques. After that, we introduce the fundamentals of acceleration and propagation in order to discuss the conjectured nearby cosmic ray sources. We then turn to theoretical notions of physics beyond the Standard Model where we consider both exotic primaries and exotic physical laws. Particular attention is given to the role that TeV-scale gravity could play in addressing the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. In the final part of the review we discuss the potential of future cosmic ray experiments for the discovery of tiny black holes that should be produced in the earth's atmosphere if TeV-scale gravity is realized in Nature.

The RHIC measurements on the transverse momentum spectra of the main category of secondary particles produced in the Au + Au collisions were reported in the recent past. The combination of the phenomenological approaches we adopted provide a satisfactory, alternative framework for understanding and explaining the latest data-spurts on charged pions, kaons and the protons–antiprotons. The comparison of the performances by the contesting models on a select kind of secondary (π⁺) which belongs to the most abundant variety has also been made. The impact and implications of all these have also been spelt out in the end.

We argue that there are no axially symmetric rotating monopole solutions for a Yang–Mills–Higgs theory in flat space–time background. We construct axially symmetric Yang–Mills–Higgs solutions in the presence of a negative cosmological constant, carrying magnetic charge n and a nonvanishing electric charge. However, these solution are also nonrotating.

We examine two restructurings of the series relationship between the bare and renormalized coupling constant in dimensional regularization. In one of these restructurings, we are able to demonstrate via all-orders summation of leading and successive ∊ = 0 (dimensionality = 4) poles that the bare coupling vanishes in the dimension-4 limit.