The Most Likely Sources of High-Energy Cosmic-Ray Electrons in Supernova Remnants
By Ta. Kobayashi, Y. Komori, K. Yoshida, J. Nishimura. 2003
248 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Evidence of nonthermal X-ray emission and TeV gamma rays from supernova remnants (SNRs) have strengthened the hypothesis that primary Galactic cosmic-ray electrons are accelerated in SNRs. High-energy electrons lose energy via synchrotron and inverse Compton processes during propagation in the Galaxy. Because of these radiative losses, TeV electrons liberated from SNRs at distances larger than ~1 kpc, or times older than ~105 yr, cannot reach the solar system. We investigated the cosmic-ray electron spectrum observed in the solar system using an analytical method and considered several candidate sources among nearby SNRs that may contribute to the high-energy electron flux. In particular, we discuss the effects for the release time from SNRs after the explosion, as well as the deviation of a source spectrum from a simple power law. From this calculation, we found that some nearby sources, such as Vela, Cygnus Loop, or Monogem, could leave unique signatures in the form of identifiable structure in the energy spectrum of TeV electrons and show anisotropies toward the sources, depending on when the electrons were liberated from the remnant. This suggests that, in addition to providing information on the mechanisms of acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays, specific cosmic-ray sources can be identified through the precise electron observation in the TeV region.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/69155c78386f62a60e0456a9aedfd7edd73c766a
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Galactic electrons and positrons at the Earth: new estimate of the primary and secondary fluxes (2010, methodology): “Following the method proposed in Kobayashi et al. (2004), we take a census of all known sources of primary electrons located within 2 kpc from the Earth in order to compute their associated flux explicitly.”
- On possible interpretations of the high energy electron–positron spectrum measured by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (2009, background): “…of those nearby sources may produce significant deviations in the most energetic part of the observed spectrum compared to the conventional homogeneous and steady state scenario (see e.g. Atoyan et al. 1995 [4], Pohl & Esposito 1998 [5], Strong & Moskalenko 2001 [6], Kobayashi et al. 2004 [1]).”
- Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data (2011, background): “For example, the electron and positron data have been explained in terms of contributions from the nearest known pulsars and supernova remnants (e.g., Cowsik & Lee, 1979; Kobayashi et al., 2004, and many other papers).”
- DISCREPANT HARDENING OBSERVED IN COSMIC-RAY ELEMENTAL SPECTRA (2010, background): “Observation of higher energy cosmic-ray electrons at Earth means that their sources must be near us in space and time (Kobayashi et al. 2004).”
- Probing the ATIC peak in the cosmic-ray electron spectrum with H.E.S.S. (2009, background): “Therefore, they must come from a few nearby sources (Shen 1970; Aharonian et al. 1995; Kobayashi et al. 2004).”
- Radio observational constraints on Galactic 3D-emission models (2007, background): “There is compelling evidence that shock acceleration in SNRs is the source for energetic CR electrons (e.g. Kobayashi et al. 2004).”
- Broad-band non-thermal emission from molecular clouds illuminated by cosmic rays from nearby supernova remnants (2009, methodology): “For the spectrum of background CR electrons we use a fit to the measured spectrum at Earth (see Kobayashi et al. 2004 for a recent compilation of data).”