UHE nuclei propagation and the interpretation of the ankle in the cosmic-ray spectrum
By D. Allard, É. Parizot, E. Khan, S. Goriely, A. V. O. I. D. P. N. d'Orsay, IN2P3-CNRSUniv. Paris-Sud, Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics, U. Chicago, D. O. Astronomy, Astrophysics and 2 more. 2005
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We consider the stochastic propagation of high-energy protons and nuclei in the cosmological microwave and infrared backgrounds, using revised photonuclear cross-sections and following primary and secondary nuclei in the full 2D nuclear chart. We confirm earlier results showing that the high-energy data can be fit with a pure proton extragalactic cosmic ray (EGCR) component if the source spectrum is ∝E −2.6 . In this case the ankle in the CR spectrum may be interpreted as a pair-production dip associated with the propagation. We show that when heavier nuclei are included in the source with a composition similar to that of Galactic cosmic-rays (GCRs), the pair-production dip is not present unless the proton fraction is higher than 85%. In the mixed composition case, the ankle recovers the past interpretation as the transition from GCRs to EGCRs and the highest energy data can be explained by a harder source spectrum ∝E −2.2 –E −2.3 , reminiscent of relativistic shock acceleration predictions, and in good agreement with the GCR data at low-energy and holistic scenarios.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb1f422dee4d25576bbb7c30747e7ae947d97032
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- The Astrophysics of Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic Rays (2011, background): “After pioneering work by Puget et al. (1976), energy losses for nuclei have been examined by several groups (Stecker & Salamon 1999; Epele & Roulet 1998a,b; Bertone et al. 2002; Khan et al. 2005; Allard et al. 2005, 2008; Hooper et al. 2005, 2008; Aloisio et al. 2008).”
- Ultra high energy cosmic rays: implications of Auger data for source spectra and chemical composition (2013, result): “This is also true for photo-disintegration of nuclei, as demonstrated by the good agreement [10] between the kinetic calculations and different MC schemes [22, 23, 24].”
- Diffusive propagation of cosmic rays from supernova remnants in the Galaxy. I: spectrum and chemical composition (2011, background): “This is true in both descriptions of the transition from galactic to extragalactic that are presently considered as most likely, namely the electron-positron dip model [40] and the mixed composition scenario [41].”
- Cosmogenic neutrinos: parameter space and detectabilty from PeV to ZeV (2010, methodology): “For this purpose we use a complete numerical Monte Carlo method that takes into account the interactions of nuclei with cosmic background radiations (see Allard et al., 2005 and Kotera et al., 2009 for more details).”