Studying individual UHECR sources with high statistics

TL;DR

The paper discusses how the JEM-EUSO mission's high exposure enables the study of individual ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) sources, addressing challenges posed by source characteristics and magnetic fields.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of the potential to identify and analyze individual UHECR sources using high-statistics data from JEM-EUSO under various astrophysical conditions.

Findings

High exposure improves source identification prospects.

Magnetic fields significantly affect spectral and positional analysis.

Different astrophysical scenarios yield varying levels of source detectability.

Abstract

One of the main impacts of the JEM-EUSO mission will come from its unprecedented exposure. This feature creates, for the first time in the field, the possibility of studying individual UHECR sources. However, the intrinsic characteristics of the sources and the injection mechanism, as well as the presence of intervening magnetic fields, present challenges to the identification of isolated sources and to the extraction of their relevant spectral information from the data. We discuss here these aspects in a quantitative way and give an overview of what can be achieved in this regard under different astrophysical scenarios.