Extragalactic ultra high energy cosmic rays, II. Comparison with experimental data

Abstract

We compare the expected contribution of FR-II hot spots to the ultra-high energy cosmic ray spectrum (Rachen & Biermann 1993, A&A in press, BB paper astro-ph/9301010) to improved experimental results. We introduce a "world data set" of UHE cosmic rays by comparing the data of various experiments, extracting relative systematic errors in the energy derivation and averaging over energy bins. Since the contribution of FR-II hot spots is expected to be dominated by protons, we can also compare it to the recent experimental results for the proton component of cosmic rays between 0.1 and 1 EeV from both the Fly's Eye and the Akeno airshower detector (Gaisser et al. 1993, Phys Rev D in press, and Stanev et al. 1992, A&A submitted). The result is striking: Our prediction for energies below 1 EeV fits very well to the data for the proton component, while explaining the total flux at highest energies as well. The result is consistent with the expectation of a galactic component, consisting of heavy nuclei only, that has a slope of about -3.1 and cuts off at 5 EeV, as predicted by Biermann 1993 (A&A in press, BB paper astro-ph/9301008)