The Interaction of Cosmic Rays with Diffuse Clouds

TL;DR

This paper models cosmic-ray interactions with diffuse clouds, showing that cosmic rays do not couple to cool clouds and their heating effect is limited to specific magnetic and pressure conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent cosmic-ray diffusion model based on streaming instability, applicable to diffuse clouds in various astrophysical environments.

Findings

Cosmic rays exert no force inside cool clouds.

Cosmic-ray density does not increase within clouds.

Cosmic-ray heating is significant only under strong magnetic fields or high cosmic-ray pressure.

Abstract

We study the change in cosmic-ray pressure, the change in cosmic-ray density, and the level of cosmic-ray induced heating via Alfven-wave damping when cosmic rays move from a hot ionized plasma to a cool cloud embedded in that plasma. The general analysis method outlined here can apply to diffuse clouds in either the ionized interstellar medium or in galactic winds. We introduce a general-purpose model of cosmic-ray diffusion building upon the hydrodynamic approximation for cosmic rays (from McKenzie & Voelk and Breitschwerdt and collaborators). Our improved method self-consistently derives the cosmic-ray flux and diffusivity under the assumption that the streaming instability is the dominant mechanism for setting the cosmic-ray flux and diffusion. We find that, as expected, cosmic rays do not couple to gas within cool clouds (cosmic rays exert no forces inside of cool clouds), that the cosmic-ray density does not increase within clouds (it may slightly decrease in general, and decrease by an order of magnitude in some cases), and that cosmic-ray heating (via Alfven-wave damping and not collisional effects as for ~10 MeV cosmic rays) is only important under the conditions of relatively strong (10 micro-Gauss) magnetic fields or high cosmic-ray pressure (~10^{-11} ergs cm^{-3}).