English

CRPropa 3.1 -- A low energy extension based on stochastic differential equations

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2017-07-26 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

The propagation of charged cosmic rays through the Galactic environment influences all aspects of the observation at Earth. Energy spectrum, composition and arrival directions are changed due to deflections in magnetic fields and interactions with the interstellar medium. Today the transport is simulated with different simulation methods either based on the solution of a transport equation (multi-particle picture) or a solution of an equation of motion (single-particle picture). We developed a new module for the publicly available propagation software CRPropa 3.1, where we implemented an algorithm to solve the transport equation using stochastic differential equations. This technique allows us to use a diffusion tensor which is anisotropic with respect to an arbitrary magnetic background field. The source code of CRPropa is written in C++ with python steering via SWIG which makes it easy to use and computationally fast. In this paper, we present the new low-energy propagation code together with validation procedures that are developed to proof the accuracy of the new implementation. Furthermore, we show first examples of the cosmic ray density evolution, which depends strongly on the ratio of the parallel κ\kappa_\parallel and perpendicular κ\kappa_\perp diffusion coefficients. This dependency is systematically examined as well the influence of the particle rigidity on the diffusion process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.07484,
  title  = {CRPropa 3.1 -- A low energy extension based on stochastic differential equations},
  author = {Lukas Merten and Julia Becker Tjus and Horst Fichtner and Björn Eichmann and Günter Sigl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07484},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in JCAP, 33 pages, 17 figures