Analytic Solution for Self-regulated Collective Escape of Cosmic Rays from their Acceleration Sites

TL;DR

This paper presents an exact analytic solution for the self-regulated escape of cosmic rays from supernova remnants, showing how CRs and Alfven waves interact to create a transport barrier that significantly alters CR diffusion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-similar analytic model that treats CRs and Alfven waves on equal footing, revealing a suppressed diffusion coefficient and a transport barrier during CR escape.

Findings

CR diffusion coefficient is exponentially suppressed compared to the background ISM.

A transport barrier forms when CR partial pressure exceeds a threshold, reducing CR leakage.

The model predicts a spectral break at a specific momentum where diffusion changes behavior.

Abstract

Supernova remnants (SNRs), as the major contributors to the galactic cosmic rays (CR), are believed to maintain an average CR spectrum by diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) regardless of the way they release CRs into the interstellar medium (ISM). However, the interaction of the CRs with nearby gas clouds crucially depends on the release mechanism. We call into question two aspects of a popular paradigm of the CR injection into the ISM, according to which they passively and isotropically diffuse in the prescribed magnetic fluctuations as test particles. First, we treat the escaping CR and the Alfven waves excited by them on an equal footing. Second, we adopt field aligned CR escape outside the source, where the waves become weak. An exact analytic self-similar solution for a CR "cloud" released by a dimmed accelerator strongly deviates from the test-particle result. The CR diffusion coefficient $D_{NL}$ is strongly suppressed compared to its background ISM value $D_{ISM}$: $D_{NL}\sim D_{ISM}\exp(-\Pi)<< D_{ISM}$ for sufficiently high field-line-integrated CR partial pressure, $\Pi$. When $\Pi>>1$, the CRs drive Alfven waves efficiently enough to build a transport barrier that strongly reduces the leakage. The solution has a spectral break at $p=p_{br}$, where $p_{br}$ satisfies the following equation $D_{NL}(p_{br})\simeq z^{2}/t$.