Current experiments in ultra-high energy cosmic ray and high energy neutrino physics may open new observational windows to the universe. In this dissertation I clarify the motivation and the challenges of ultra-high energy cosmic ray astronomy, and discuss in detail the opportunities for neutrino mixing studies at the next-generation neutrino telescopes. In particular, I present a technique to properly evaluate the expected anisotropy in the ultra-high energy cosmic ray arrival distribution starting from a given astronomical catalogue of the local universe. By applying this method to the IRAS PSCz catalogue of galaxies, I establish the minimum statistics needed to significantly reject the hypothesis that ultra-high energy cosmic rays trace the baryonic distribution in the universe. A forecast for the Auger experiment is provided. I also treat the influence of the Galactic magnetic field on the arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. If the Galactic magnetic field was known with sufficient precision, it could be used as a spectrograph to discriminate among source models and primaries of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. I compare several Galactic magnetic field models and discuss for the example of the AGASA data how the significance of small scale clustering or correlations with proposed astrophysical sources are affected by the Galactic magnetic field. Deflections of charged particles induced by the Galactic magnetic field and claims of anisotropies in cosmic ray data around 10^{18} eV could point to neutron beam sources in the primary flux of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. If neutron beams do exist, they might open interesting perspectives to probe neutrino mixing at neutrino telescopes. After an introduction to the field of high energy neutrinos, the new topic of neutrino flavour mixing studies at high energy telescopes is detailed, and other sources and observables suitable to that purpose are discussed.
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Current experiments in ultra-high energy cosmic ray and high energy neutrino physics may open new observational windows to the universe. In this dissertation I clarify the motivation and the challenges of ultra-high energy cosmic ray astronomy, and discuss in detail the opportunities for neutrino mixing studies at the next-generation neutrino telescopes. In particular, I present a technique to properly evaluate the expected anisotropy in the ultra-high energy cosmic ray arrival distribution star...
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