"The Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays"
Recent
results on the highest energy cosmic rays indicate that
the cosmic rays spectrum continues well beyond 10^20
eV. Because cosmic
hadrons should interact inelastically with 2.7 deg black
body radiation
at these energies, the sources of these particles must
be relatively
local - within 50 Mpc. No astrophysically interesting
candidate sources
such as AGN's have been identified in the direction error
boxes of these
particles. The origin of the highest energy particles
in nature thus
remains a mystery. These results and plans for new experiments
to study
this mystery with much better sensitivity will be presented.