Superconducting cosmic strings may play an important role in the relatively late Universe in formation of structure and in driving highly exoergic processes. With fermionic charge carriers they are expected to eject, in their last stages, high-mass particles which can subsequently decay to produce ultra-high-energy electromagnetic, neutrino, and hadronic radiation. The bosonic cosmic string may undergo a similar saturation behavior. Cosmic-ray physics places significant limits on these scenarios. Furthermore, this provides an example of a fundamental mechanism for the production of the observed ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with some characteristically unusual, perhaps observable, features.

• Received 17 November 1986

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.36.1007