Gamma-ray bursts and particle astrophysics: Future prospects

I review the status and recent achievements of gamma-ray burst physics, and recent developments in VHE-UHE studies of high energy astrophysical sources. Gamma-ray bursts are capable of accelerating cosmic rays up to GZK energies E_p ∼ 10²⁰ eV, which can lead to a flux at Earth comparable to that observed by large EAS arrays such as AUGER. The semi-relativistic outflows inferred in GRB-related hypernovae are also likely sources of lower energy cosmic rays. Leptonic processes, such as synchrotron and inverse Compton, as well as hadronic processes, can lead to GeV-TeV gamma-rays measurable by GLAST, AGILE, or ACTs, providing useful probes of the burst physics and model parameters. Photo-meson interactions also produce neutrinos at energies ranging from sub-TeV to EeV, which will be probed with forthcoming experiments such as IceCube, ANITA and KM3NeT. This would provide information about the fundamental interaction physics, the acceleration mechanism, the nature of the sources and their environment. I describe future satellite and ground facilities for neutrino, cosmic ray and VHE gamma-ray studies of GRB and other astrophysical sources, and discuss related theoretical expectations and prospects.