Extragalactic cosmic ray self-confinement around sources
Abstract
Most models of the origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays rely on the existence of luminous extragalactic sources. Cosmic rays escaping the galaxy where the source is located produce a sufficiently large electric current to justify the investigation of plasma instabilities induced by such current. Most interesting is the excitation of modes that lead to production of magnetic perturbations that may scatter particles thereby hindering their escape, or at least changing the propagation mode of escaping cosmic rays. We argue that self-generation of waves may force cosmic rays to be confined in the source proximity for energies GeV for low background magnetic fields (). For larger values of , cosmic rays are confined close to their sources for energies GeV, where is the field in units of nG, is its coherence length in units of 10 Mpc and is the source luminosity in units of erg/s.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1508.04698,
title = {Extragalactic cosmic ray self-confinement around sources},
author = {P. Blasi and E. Amato and M. D'Angelo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04698},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Contributed Talk at the 34th ICRC, held in the Hague, The Netherlands from July 30 to August 6, 2015. Content based on a paper accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. (arXiv:1508.02866)