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تسجيل مستخدم جديدNon-linear acceleration at supernova remnant shocks and the hardening in the cosmic ray spectrum
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In the last few years several experiments have shown that the cosmic ray spectrum below the knee is not a perfect power-law. In particular, the proton and helium spectra show a spectral hardening by ~ 0.1-0.2 in spectral index at particle energies of ~ 200-300 GeV/nucleon. Moreover, the helium spectrum is found to be harder than that of protons by ~ 0.1 and some evidence for a similar hardening was also found in the spectra of heavier elements. Here we consider the possibility that the hardening may be the result of a dispersion in the slope of the spectrum of cosmic rays accelerated at supernova remnant shocks. Such a dispersion is indeed expected within the framework of non-linear theories of diffusive shock acceleration, which predict steeper (harder) particle spectra for larger (smaller) cosmic ray acceleration efficiencies.
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In the past few years, gamma-ray astronomy has entered a golden age. At TeV energies, only a handful of sources were known a decade ago, but the current generation of ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes has increased this number to
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