Testing the consistency of proapgation between light and heavy cosmic ray nuclei

TL;DR

This study combines cosmic ray data from multiple space experiments to analyze and compare the propagation behaviors of light and heavy nuclei, revealing consistent high-energy diffusion slopes but discrepancies at low energies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of cosmic ray propagation parameters using recent high-precision data, highlighting differences in low-energy transport between light and heavy nuclei.

Findings

Heavy and light nuclei show compatible diffusion slopes at medium to high energies.

Significant differences exist in low-energy transport behaviors between heavy and light cosmic rays.

The study suggests the need for improved models of solar modulation and cross-section data.

Abstract

One of the fundamental issues in cosmic ray physics is to explain the nature of cosmic ray acceleration and propagation mechanisms. Thanks to the precise cosmic ray data measured by recent space experiments, we are able to investigate the cosmic ray acceleration and propagation models more comprehensively and reliably. In this paper, we combine the secondary-to-primary ratios and the primary spectra measured by PAMELA, AMS02, ACE-CRIS and Voyager-1 to constrain the cosmic ray source and transport parameters. The study shows that the $Z>2$ data yield a medium-energy diffusion slope $\delta_{2}\sim\left(0.42, 0.48\right)$ and a high-energy slope $\delta_{3}\sim\left(0.22, 0.34\right)$. The $Z\leq2$ species obtain a looser constraint on $\delta_{2}\sim\left(0.38, 0.47\right)$, but a tighter constraint on $\delta_{3}\sim\left(0.21, 0.30\right)$. The overlaps infer that the heavy and light particles can give compatible results at medium to high energies. Besides, both the light and heavy nuclei indicate a consistent diffusion slope variation $\Delta\delta_{H}$ around $200\sim300$~GV. At low energies, significant disagreements exist between the heavy and light elements. The B/C ratio requires a much larger diffusion slope shift $\Delta\delta_{L}$ around 4 GV or a stronger \textit{Alfv$\acute{e}$n velocity} $v_{A}$ than the low-mass data. This indicates that the heavy and light particles may suffer different low-energy transport behaviors in Galaxy. However, better understanding on the consistency/inconsistency between the heavy and light cosmic rays relies on more precise cross-sections, better constraints on correlations in systematic errors of data, more accurate estimation on Galaxy halo size and more robust description for Solar modulation during the reversal period of HMF.