Abstract

It is suggested that the physical mechanism responsible for the acceleration of cosmic rays is due to the stochastic (or fluctuational) structure of space-time at small distances. A method of introducing fluctuations in a conformally flat Riemannian space-time metric due to ultrahigh energy particles is presented, from which a nonlinear dynamics of particles and equations for the electromagnetic field are obtained. The former admits the acceleration mechanism for cosmic-ray particles and the extreme energy increases during the evolution of the Universe. In our model the energy of the cosmic-ray particle and its radius (the effective Schwarzschild), the age of the universe, and the value of the fundamental length are connected with one another and are determined by a unified formula, Einstein's relation for the relativistic particle energy. It allows one to define experimentally the value of the fundamental length, which is l=1.56×10−33 cm for the maximum proton energy observed in cosmic rays. The problem of the energy spectrum of the cosmic rays and the ratio of intensities of the electron component to the proton component at the same energy level are also discussed.