Testing the universality of cosmic-ray nuclei from protons to oxygen with AMS-02

TL;DR

This study uses high-precision AMS-02 data to test the universality of cosmic-ray nuclei acceleration and propagation, revealing violations among different species and exploring alternative models to reconcile these differences.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive joint analysis of multiple cosmic-ray species, demonstrating that standard propagation models cannot fully explain the observed spectral differences, thus challenging the universality assumption.

Findings

CR universality is violated among He, C, N, O species.

Different injection slopes are needed for different nuclei.

Alternative propagation scenarios may restore universality.

Abstract

The AMS-02 experiment has provided high-precision measurements of several cosmic-ray (CR) species. The achieved percent-level accuracy gives access to small spectral differences among the different species and, in turn, this allows scrutinizing the universality of CR acceleration, which is expected in the standard scenario of CR shock acceleration. While pre-AMS-02 data already indicated a violation of the universality between protons and helium, it is still an open question if at least helium and heavier nuclei can be reconciled. To address this issue, we performed a joint analysis using the AMS-02 CR measurements of antiprotons, protons, helium, helium 3, boron, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. We explore two competing propagation scenarios, one with a break in the diffusion coefficient at a few GVs and no reacceleration, and another one with reacceleration and with a break in the injection spectra of primaries. Furthermore, we explicitly consider the impact of the uncertainties in the nuclear production cross-sections of secondaries by including nuisance parameters in the fit. The resulting parameter space is explored with the help of Monte Carlo methods. We find that, contrary to the naive expectation, in the standard propagation scenarios CR universality is violated also for He, on the one hand, and C, N, and O, on the other hand, i.e., different injection slopes (at the level of $ \Delta \sim 0.05$) are required to explain the observed spectra. As an alternative, we explore further propagation scenarios, inspired by non-homogeneous diffusion, which might save universality. Finally, we also investigate the universality of CR propagation, i.e., we compare the propagation properties inferred using only light nuclei ($\bar{p}$, p, He, $^3$He) with the ones inferred using only heavier nuclei (B, C, N, O).