Study of the Correlation of Utra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

We have studied the correlation between ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) from the arrival directions of the UHECRs and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) sources to investigate the origin of the UHECRs detected at the AUGER experiment (PAO). According to the first result of the PAO, the arrival direction of the UHECRs above 6 x 10^{19} eV is correlated with the AGN lying within about 75 Mpc or other objects with a similar spatial distribution. However our hypothesis study shows there is no clear correlation of the their spatial distributions if the deflection effect is not strong in cosmological space. Our future plan is to test AGN hypothesis more precisly with experimental data set accumulated by both the PAO and the Telescope Array (TA) experiment in next few years.