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Anomalous Anisotropies of Cosmic Rays from Turbulent Magnetic Fields

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2014-01-22 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The propagation of cosmic rays (CRs) in turbulent interstellar magnetic fields is typically described as a spatial diffusion process. This formalism predicts only a small deviation from an isotropic CR distribution in the form of a dipole in the direction of the CR density gradient or relative background flow. We show that the existence of a global CR dipole moment necessarily generates a spectrum of higher multipole moments in the local CR distribution. These "anomalous" anisotropies are a direct consequence of Liouville's theorem in the presence of a local turbulent magnetic field. We show that the predictions of this model are in excellent agreement with the observed power spectrum of multi-TeV CRs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1310.5712,
  title  = {Anomalous Anisotropies of Cosmic Rays from Turbulent Magnetic Fields},
  author = {Markus Ahlers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.5712},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

version published in Phys. Rev. Lett 112, 021101 (2014)