English

Cosmic-Ray Electron Excess from Pulsars is Spiky or Smooth?: Continuous and Multiple Electron/Positron injections

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-04-23 v2

Abstract

We investigate the observed spectrum of cosmic-ray electrons and positrons from astrophysical sources, especially pulsars, and the physical processes for making the spectrum spiky or smooth via continuous and multiple electron/positron injections. We find that (1) the average electron spectrum predicted from nearby pulsars are consistent with PAMELA, Fermi and H.E.S.S. data. However, the ATIC/PPB-BETS peak around 500GeV is hard to produce by the sum of multiple pulsar contributions and requires a single (or a few) energetic pulsar(s). (2) A continuous injection produces a broad peak and a high energy tail above the peak, which can constrain the source duration (105\lesssim 10^5yr with the current data). (3) The H.E.S.S. data in the TeV range suggest that young sources with age less than 6×104\sim 6 \times 10^4yr are less energetic than 1048erg\sim 10^{48}{\rm erg}. (4) We also expect a large dispersion in the TeV spectrum due to the small number of sources, that may cause the high energy cutoff inferred by H.E.S.S. and potentially provide a smoking-gun for the astrophysical origin. These spectral diagnostics can be refined in the near future by the CALET experiments to discriminate different astrophysical and dark matter origins.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.3782,
  title  = {Cosmic-Ray Electron Excess from Pulsars is Spiky or Smooth?: Continuous and Multiple Electron/Positron injections},
  author = {Norita Kawanaka and Kunihito Ioka and Mihoko M. Nojiri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.3782},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, revised to reflect referee's comments, added Fermi/HESS results