Luminous infrared galaxies as possible sources of UHE cosmic rays

Ultra high energy (UHE) particles coming from discrete extragalactic sources are potential candidates for EAS events above a few tens of EeV In particular, galaxies with huge infrared luminosity triggered by collision and merging processes are possible sites of UHECR acceleration. Here we check whether this could be the case. Using the PSCz catalogue of IR galaxies we calculate a large scale anisotropy of UHE protons originating in the population of the luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs). Small angle particle scattering in weak irregular extragalactic magnetic fields as well as deflection by regular galactic field are taken into account. We give analytical formulae for deflection angles with included energy losses on cosmic microwave background (CMB). The hypotheses of the anisotropic and isotropic distributions of the experimental data above 40 EeV from AGASA are checked, using various statistical tests. The tests applied for the large scale data distribution are not conclusive in distinguishing between isotropy and our origin scenario for the available small data sample. However, we show that on the basis of the small scale clustering analysis there is a much better correlation of the UHECRs data below GZK cut-off with the predictions of the LIRG origin than with those of isotropy. We derive analytical formulae for a probability of a given number of doublets, triplets and quadruplets for any density distribution of independent events on the sky. The famous AGASA UHE triple event is found to be very well correlated on the sky with the brightest extragalactic infrared source within 70 Mpc-merger galaxies Arp 299 (NGC 3690 + IC 694).