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Register a new userOrigin of Small-Scale Anisotropies in Galactic Cosmic Rays
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The arrival directions of Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) are highly isotropic. This is expected from the presence of turbulent magnetic fields in our Galactic environment that repeatedly scatter charged CRs during propagation. However, various CR observatories have identified weak anisotropies of various angular sizes and with relative intensities of up to a level of 1 part in 1,000. Whereas large-scale anisotropies are generally predicted by standard diffusion models, the appearance of small-scale anisotropies down to an angular size of 10 degrees is surprising. In this review, we summarise the current experimental situation for both the large-scale and small-scale anisotropies. We address some of the issues in comparing different experimental results and remaining questions in interpreting the observed large-scale anisotropies. We then review the standard diffusive picture and its difficulty in producing the small-scale anisotropies. Having set the stage, we review the various ideas and models put forward for explaining the small-scale anisotropies.
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The origin of the bulk of cosmic rays (CRs) observed at Earth is the topic of a century long investigation, paved with successes and failures. From the energetic point of view, supernova remnants (SNRs) remain the most plausible sources of CRs up to rigidity ? 10^6-10^7 GV. This confidence somehow resulted in the construction of a paradigm, the so-called SNR paradigm: CRs are accelerated through diffusive shock acceleration in SNRs and propagate diffusively in the Galaxy in an energy dependent way. Qualitative confirmation of the SNR acceleration scenario has recently been provided by gamma ray and X-ray observations. Diffusive propagation in the Galaxy is probed observationally through measurement of the secondary to primary nuclei flux ratios (such as B/C). There are however some weak points in the paradigm, which suggest that we are probably missing some physical ingredients in our models. The theory of diffusive shock acceleration at SNR shocks predicts spectra of accelerated particles which are systematically too hard compared with the ones inferred from gamma ray observations. Moreover, hard injection spectra indirectly imply a steep energy dependence of the diffusion coefficient in the Galaxy, which in turn leads to anisotropy larger than the observed one. Moreover recent measurements of the flux of nuclei suggest that the spectra have a break at rigidity ? 200 GV, which does not sit well with the common wisdom in acceleration and propagation. In this paper I will review these new developments and suggest some possible implications.
The distribution of arrival directions of cosmic rays is remarkably isotropic, which is a consequence of their repeated scattering in magnetic fields. Yet, high-statistics observatories like IceCube and HAWC have revealed the presence of small-scale structures at levels of 1 part in 10,000 at hundreds of TeV, which are not expected in typical diffusion models of cosmic rays. We follow up on the suggestion that these small-scale anisotropies are a result of cosmic ray streaming in a particular realisation of the turbulent magnetic field within a few scattering lengths in our local Galactic neighbourhood. So far, this hypothesis has been investigated mostly numerically, by tracking test particles through turbulent magnetic fields. For the first time, we present an analytical computation that through a perturbative approach allows predicting the angular power spectrum of cosmic ray arrival directions for a given model of turbulence. We illustrate this method for a simple, isotropic turbulence model and we find remarkable agreement with the results of numerical studies.
We analyze the results of recent measurements of Galactic cosmic ray (GCRs) energy spectra and the spectra of nonthermal emission from supernova remnants (SNRs) in order to determine their consistency with GCR origin in SNRs. It is shown that the measured primary and secondary CR nuclei energy spectra as well as the observed positron-to-electron ratio are consistent with the origin of GCRs up to the energy 10^17 eV in SNRs. Existing SNR emission data provide evidences for efficient CR production in SNRs accompanied by significant magnetic field amplification. In some cases the nature of the detected gamma-ray emission is difficult to determine because key SNR parameters are not known or poorly constrained.
The composition of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) presents strong similarities to the standard (cosmic) composition, but also noticeable differences, the most important being the high isotopic ratio of Ne22/Ne20 which is about 5 times higher in GCR than in the Sun. This ratio provides key information on the GCR origin. We investigate the idea that GCR are accelerated by the forward shocks of supernova explosions, as they run through the presupernova winds of the massive stars and through the interstellar medium. We use detailed wind and core yields of rotating and non-rotating models of massive stars with mass loss, as well as simple models for the properties of the forward shock and of the circumstellar medium. We find that the observed GCR Ne22/Ne20 ratio can be explained if GCR are accelerated only during the early Sedov phase, for shock velocities >1500-1900 km/s. The acceleration efficiency is found to be of the order of 1.e-6 - 1.e-5, i.e. a few particles out of a million encountered by the shock escape the SN at GCR energies. We also show quantitatively that the widely publicized idea that GCR are accelerated in superbubbles fails to account for the high Ne22/Ne20 ratio in GCR
A self-consistent model of a one-dimensional cosmic-ray (CR) halo around the Galactic disk is formulated with the restriction to a minimum number of free parameters. It is demonstrated that the turbulent cascade of MHD waves does not necessarily play an essential role in the halo formation. Instead, an increase of the Alfven velocity with distance to the disk leads to an efficient generic mechanism of the turbulent redshift, enhancing CR scattering by the self-generated MHD waves. As a result, the calculated size of the CR halo at lower energies is determined by the halo sheath, an energy-dependent region around the disk beyond which the CR escape becomes purely advective. At sufficiently high energies, the halo size is set by the characteristic thickness of the ionized gas distribution. The calculated Galactic spectrum of protons shows a remarkable agreement with observations, reproducing the position of spectral break at ~ 0.6 TeV and the spectral shape up to ~ 10 TeV.
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