summary - Reports the energy spectrum of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays from over 215,000 air-shower events recorded over 14 years by the Pierre Auger Observatory’s surface-detector array, with the energy scale set calorimetrically via the fluorescence detector, independent of assumptions about hadronic-interaction models or primary composition. Measures cosmic-ray flux up to and beyond 10^20 eV - center-of-mass energies vastly exceeding the LHC’s ~10^17 eV nucleon-nucleon collisions - and identifies a new spectral break (“instep”) around 1.3x10^19 eV in addition to the previously known ankle and GZK-suppression features. A 2025 conference update (19 years of data) refines but does not qualitatively change this spectrum.
relevance_note - The primary flux/spectrum measurement underlying the cosmic-ray-survival premise used across the black-hole, strangelet, and vacuum-decay arguments (Giddings & Mangano 2008 cites the equivalent contemporaneous Auger spectrum result); this is the one cosmic-ray-flux node for this slice - do not multiply.
Dataset and energy calibration
O-5 - Auger recorded 215,030 events above 2.5x10^18 eV with flux extending beyond 10^20 eV
Raw empirical backbone of the cosmic-ray survival premise: particles at ~10^20 eV (fixed-target sqrt(s) ~ 400 TeV, far above the LHC’s 14 TeV) demonstrably exist and arrive at a measurable rate.
Link to original
O-7 - Auger energy scale is calorimetric and hadronic-model independent with about 14 percent systematic
Load-bearing for the survival argument: the claim that cosmic-ray energies genuinely exceed LHC energies by orders of magnitude cannot be an artifact of shower-modelling assumptions, and a 14% energy-scale error is negligible against the ~10^3 energy margin.
Link to original
Spectrum
O-6 - Auger spectrum shows ankle, instep, and suppression above 5x10^19 eV with nonzero flux beyond 10^20 eV
The suppression (GZK-like) reduces but does not zero the >10^20 eV flux - relevant to how many super-LHC-energy collisions astronomical bodies accumulate per Gyr.
Link to original