Published December 3, 2021 | Version Submitted
Discussion Paper Open

Standard Self-Confinement and Extrinsic Turbulence Models for Cosmic Ray Transport are Fundamentally Incompatible with Observations

Abstract

Models for cosmic ray (CR) dynamics fundamentally depend on the rate of CR scattering from magnetic fluctuations. In the ISM, for CRs with energies ~MeV-TeV, these fluctuations are usually attributed either to 'extrinsic turbulence' (ET) -- a cascade from larger scales -- or 'self-confinement' (SC) -- self-generated fluctuations from CR streaming. Using simple analytic arguments and detailed 'live' numerical CR transport calculations in galaxy simulations, we show that both of these, in standard form, cannot explain even basic qualitative features of observed CR spectra. For ET, any spectrum that obeys critical balance or features realistic anisotropy, or any spectrum that accounts for finite damping below the dissipation scale, predicts qualitatively incorrect spectral shapes and scalings of B/C and other species. Even if somehow one ignored both anisotropy and damping, observationally-required scattering rates disagree with ET predictions by orders-of-magnitude. For SC, the dependence of driving on CR energy density means that it is nearly impossible to recover observed CR spectral shapes and scalings, and again there is an orders-of-magnitude normalization problem. But more severely, SC solutions with super-Alfvenic streaming are unstable. In live simulations, they revert to either arbitrarily-rapid CR escape with zero secondary production, or to bottleneck solutions with far-too-strong CR confinement and secondary production. Resolving these fundamental issues without discarding basic plasma processes requires invoking different drivers for scattering fluctuations. These must act on a broad range of scales with a power spectrum obeying several specific (but plausible) constraints.

Additional Information

Support for PFH was provided by NSF Research Grants 1911233 & 20009234, NSF CAREER grant 1455342, NASA grants 80NSSC18K0562, HST-AR-15800.001-A. Support for JS was provided by Rutherford Discovery Fellowship RDF-U001804 and Marsden Fund grant UOO1727, which are managed through the Royal Society Te Aparangi. Numerical calculations were run on the Caltech compute cluster "Wheeler," allocations FTA-Hopkins/AST20016 supported by the NSF and TACC, and NASA HEC SMD-16-7592. DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT. The data supporting this article are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
113650
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20220228-183308775

Funding

NSF
AST-1911233
NSF
AST-20009234
NSF
AST-1455342
NASA
80NSSC18K0562
NASA
HST-AR-15800.001-A
Royal Society Te Apārangi
RDF-U001804
Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand
UOO1727
NSF
AST-20016
NASA
SMD-16-7592

Dates

Created
2022-02-28
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2023-06-02
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
TAPIR , Astronomy Department