Related papers: Cosmic ray ionization of the interstellar medium
We present the first simulations evolving resolved spectra of cosmic rays (CRs) from MeV-TeV energies (including electrons, positrons, (anti)protons, and heavier nuclei), in live kinetic-MHD galaxy simulations with star formation and…
An overview on the present observational status and phenomenological understanding of cosmic rays above 10^16 eV is given. Above these energies the cosmic ray flux is expected to be gradually dominated by an extra-galactic component. In…
The detection of cosmic rays with energy around and in excess of $10^{20}$ eV raises many questions that future experiments will help answering to. I address here my view of some of these open issues, as they are now and as they might be…
Observations of cosmic rays with energies above ~ 4 x 10^{10} GeV have inspired several speculative suggestions concerning their origin. The crucial question is whether or not the spectrum exhibits the expected `GZK cutoff' at this energy…
Cosmic rays are an essential ingredient in the evolution of the interstellar medium, as they dominate the ionisation of the dense molecular gas, where stars and planets form. However, since they are efficiently scattered by the galactic…
Galactic cosmic rays are believed to be accelerated at supernova remnants via diffusive shock acceleration. Though this mechanism gives fairly robust predictions for the spectrum of particles accelerated at the shock, the spectrum of the…
Although cosmic rays were discovered over 100 years ago their origin remains uncertain. They have an energy spectrum that extends from 1 GeV to beyond 1020 eV, where the rate is less than 1 particle per km2 per century. Shortly after the…
Data obtained in the ATIC-2 (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter), CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass)) and PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) experiments suggest that elemental interstellar…
Cosmic rays produce molecular cluster ions as they pass through the lower atmosphere. Neutral molecular clusters such as dimers and complexes are expected to make a small contribution to the radiative balance, but atmospheric absorption by…
We present convenient formulae for the energy losses of energetic atomic nuclei over the entire energy range relevant to the physics of cosmic rays. Results are applied to a leaky-box equation with a complete loss term. Thereby we derive…
The luminosity densities of high-energy cosmic radiations are studied to find connections among the various components, including high-energy neutrinos measured with IceCube and gamma rays with the Fermi satellite. Matching the cosmic-ray…
Energetic particles, traditionally called Cosmic Rays, were discovered nearly a hundred years ago, and their origin is still uncertain. Their main constituents are the normal nuclei as in the standard cosmic abundances of matter, with some…
The energy spectrum of electrons produced in molecular gas by interstellar cosmic rays (CRs) is rigorously calculated as a function of gas column density $N$ traversed by the CRs. This allows us to accurately compute the local value of the…
A model to describe cosmic ray spectra in the energy region from 10 GeV to 100 PeV is suggested based on the assumption that Galactic cosmic ray flux is a mixture of fluxes accelerated by shocks from nova and supernova of different types.…
The problem of the origin of cosmic rays in the shocks produced by supernova explosions at energies below the so called 'knee' (at ~3*10$^6$ GeV) in the energy spectrum is addressed, with special attention to the propagation of the…
We examine limits to the energy to which cosmic rays can be accelerated by relativistic shocks, showing that acceleration of light ions as high as 100 EeV is unlikely. The implication of our estimates is that if ultra-high energy cosmic…
The elemental energy spectra of cosmic rays play an important role in understanding their acceleration and propagation. Most current results are obtained either from direct measurements by balloon or satellite detectors, or from indirect…
A brief review of the energy spectrum of primary cosmic rays above $10^{10}$ eV and the measurement techniques used to investigate the ultra high energy ones is given. This is followed by a discussion of the atmospheric shower profile of…
The ultra-high energy cosmic rays observed at the Earth are most likely accelerated in extra-galactic sources. For the typical luminosities invoked for such sources, the electric current associated to the flux of cosmic rays that leave them…
More than 90% of the Galactic gas-related gamma-ray emissivity above 1 GeV is attributed to the decay of neutral pions formed in collisions between cosmic rays and interstellar matter, with lepton-induced processes becoming increasingly…