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Register a new userCosmic Rays in Intermittent Magnetic Fields
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The propagation of cosmic rays in turbulent magnetic fields is a diffusive process driven by the scattering of the charged particles by random magnetic fluctuations. Such fields are usually highly intermittent, consisting of intense magnetic filaments and ribbons surrounded by weaker, unstructured fluctuations. Studies of cosmic ray propagation have largely overlooked intermittency, instead relying on Gaussian random magnetic fields. Using test particle simulations, we investigate cosmic ray diffusivity in intermittent, dynamo-generated magnetic fields. The results are compared with those obtained from non-intermittent magnetic fields having identical power spectra. The presence of magnetic intermittency significantly enhances cosmic ray diffusion over a wide range of particle energies. We demonstrate that the results can be interpreted in terms of a correlated random walk.
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We briefly review sources of cosmic rays, their composition and spectra as well as their propagation in the galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields, both regular and fluctuating. A special attention is paid to the recent results of the X-ray and gamma-ray observations that shed light on the origin of the galactic cosmic rays and the challenging results of Pierre Auger Observatory on the ultra high energy cosmic rays. The perspectives of both high energy astrophysics and cosmic-ray astronomy to identify the sources of ultra high energy cosmic rays, the mechanisms of particle acceleration, to measure the intergalactic radiation fields and to reveal the structure of magnetic fields of very different scales are outlined.
As the fundamental physical process with many astrophysical implications, the diffusion of cosmic rays (CRs) is determined by their interaction with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. We consider the magnetic mirroring effect arising from MHD turbulence on the diffusion of CRs. Due to the intrinsic superdiffusion of turbulent magnetic fields, CRs with large pitch angles that undergo mirror reflection, i.e., bouncing CRs, are not trapped between magnetic mirrors, but move diffusively along the magnetic field, leading to a new type of parallel diffusion. This diffusion is in general slower than the diffusion of non-bouncing CRs with small pitch angles that undergo gyroresonant scattering. The critical pitch angle at the balance between magnetic mirroring and pitch-angle scattering is important for determining the diffusion coefficients of both bouncing and non-bouncing CRs and their scalings with the CR energy. We find non-universal energy scalings of diffusion coefficients, depending on the properties of MHD turbulence.
Synchrotron radiation from cosmic rays is a key observational probe of the galactic magnetic field. Interpreting synchrotron emission data requires knowledge of the cosmic ray number density, which is often assumed to be in energy equipartition (or otherwise tightly correlated) with the magnetic field energy. However, there is no compelling observational or theoretical reason to expect such tight correlation to hold across all scales. We use test particle simulations, tracing the propagation of charged particles (protons) through a random magnetic field, to study the cosmic ray distribution at scales comparable to the correlation scale of the turbulent flow in the interstellar medium ($simeq 100,{rm pc}$ in spiral galaxies). In these simulations, we find that there is no spatial correlation between the cosmic ray number density and the magnetic field energy density. In fact, their distributions are approximately statistically independent. We find that low-energy cosmic rays can become trapped between magnetic mirrors, whose location depends more on the structure of the field lines than on the field strength.
Interpretations of synchrotron observations often assume a tight correlation between magnetic and cosmic ray energy densities. We examine this assumption using both test-particle simulations of cosmic rays and MHD simulations which include cosmic rays as a diffusive fluid. We find no spatial correlation between the cosmic rays and magnetic field energy densities at turbulent scales. Moreover, the cosmic ray number density and magnetic field energy density are statistically independent. Nevertheless, the cosmic ray spatial distribution is highly inhomogeneous, especially at low energies because the particles are trapped between random magnetic mirrors. These results can significantly change the interpretation of synchrotron observations and thus our understanding of the strength and structure of magnetic fields in the Milky Way and nearby spiral galaxies.
The propagation of charged particles, including cosmic rays, in a partially ordered magnetic field is characterized by a diffusion tensor whose components depend on the particles Larmor radius $R_L$ and the degree of order in the magnetic field. Most studies of the particle diffusion presuppose a scale separation between the mean and random magnetic fields (e.g., there being a pronounced minimum in the magnetic power spectrum at intermediate scales). Scale separation is often a good approximation in laboratory plasmas, but not in most astrophysical environments such as the interstellar medium (ISM). Modern simulations of the ISM have numerical resolution of order 1 pc, so the Larmor radius of the cosmic rays that dominate in energy density is at least $10^{6}$ times smaller than the resolved scales. Large-scale simulations of cosmic ray propagation in the ISM thus rely on oversimplified forms of the diffusion tensor. We take the first steps towards a more realistic description of cosmic ray diffusion for such simulations, obtaining direct estimates of the diffusion tensor from test particle simulations in random magnetic fields (with the Larmor radius scale being fully resolved), for a range of particle energies corresponding to $10^{-2}lesssim R_L/l_c lesssim 10^{3}$, where $l_c$ is the magnetic correlation length. We obtain explicit expressions for the cosmic ray diffusion tensor for $R_L/l_c ll 1$, that might be used in a sub-grid model of cosmic ray diffusion. The diffusion coefficients obtained are closely connected with existing transport theories that include the random walk of magnetic lines.
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