Cosmic rays are even smaller and thus higher energy, 10^-6 or so?
What are the highest energy electromagnetic waves that are possible? Is there a limit?
And if there is a limit, at 10^whatever, why is this a limit? Why wouldn’t you be able to go on and on ad infinitum squeezing more and more energy into a smaller and smaller space?
Cosmic rays are paticles, not electromagnetic waves.
Any photon above a couple hundred keV energy is called a gamma ray. There is no upper limit in energy that I’m aware of, besides the practical concerns of how to generate such a high-energy photon.
While it’s not exactly wrong to call the cosmic radiation waves, it’s misleading. At those tremendusly high energies (several GeV/TeV) the wave-nature is negligible, and they behave mostly as particles.
Extremely energetic cosmic rays strike the earth every day at an energy several orders of magnitudes higher than what we can produce (or even contemplate to produce) in our multi-billion dollar/euro laboratories, such as CERN or Fermilab.
Sorry, I should have said that cosmic rays are massive particles - protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei. As opposed to gamma rays, which are photons. Yes, both can be considered either waves or particles.
I think the CERN particle accelerators go up to 10^12 eV. The highest energy cosmic ray particle recorded is of the order 10^20 eV, a hundred trillion times more energy. Cosmic gamma rays up to 10^12 eV range are observed, but I don’t know about anything higher. It should be easier to accelerate massive particles than photons though. Once a photon is created, you can’t add energy to it. Massive particles can be accelerated gradually.