Ultrahigh-energy photons as a probe of nearby transient ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray sources and possible Lorentz-invariance violation.
Detecting neutrinos and photons is crucial to identifying the sources of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), especially for transient sources. We focus on ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray emission from transient sources such as gamma-ray bursts, since >EeV gamma rays can be more direct evidence of UHECRs than approximately PeV neutrinos and GeV-TeV gamma rays. We demonstrate that coincident detections of approximately 1-100 events can be expected by current and future UHECR detectors such as Auger and JEM-EUSO, and the detection probability can be higher than that of neutrinos for nearby transient sources at < or approximately equal to 50-100 Mpc. They may be useful for constraining the uncertain cosmic radio background as well as knowing the source properties and maximum energy of UHECRs. They can also give us more than 10(4) times stronger limits on the Lorentz-invariance violation than current constraints.
Murase
Kohta
K
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.