Chaos, Cosmic Ray Anisotropy, and the Heliosphere

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chaos and magnetic trapping within the heliosphere influence TeV cosmic ray anisotropy, introducing a new method to analyze chaotic behavior and its impact on cosmic ray arrival distributions.

Contribution

It develops a novel approach to study cosmic ray chaos using a heliospheric magnetic model, linking chaos levels to trapping time and exploring their effects on anisotropy.

Findings

Chaos level correlates with trapping duration via a power law.

Heliospheric magnetic structures induce chaotic trajectories affecting CR arrival directions.

Chaotic behavior varies spatially, contributing to time variability in cosmic ray maps.

Abstract

After more than a century of discovering cosmic rays, a comprehensive description of their origin, propagation, and composition still eludes us. One of the difficulties is that these particles interact with magnetic fields; therefore, their directional information is distorted as they travel. In addition, as cosmic rays (CRs) propagate in the Galaxy, they can be affected by magnetic structures that temporarily trap them and cause their trajectories to display chaotic behavior, therefore modifying the simple diffusion scenario. Here, we examine the effects of chaos and trapping on the TeV CR anisotropy. Concretely, we develop a new method to study the chaotic behavior of CRs. This work is based on the heliospheric effects since they can be remarkably significant for this anisotropy. Specifically, how the distinct heliospheric structures can affect chaos levels. We model the heliosphere as a coherent magnetic structure given by a static magnetic bottle and the presence of temporal magnetic perturbations. This configuration is used to describe the draping of the local interstellar magnetic field lines around the heliosphere and the effects of magnetic field reversals induced by the solar cycles. In this work, we explore the possibility that particle trajectories may develop chaotic behavior while traversing and being temporarily trapped in this heliospheric-inspired toy model and its potential consequences on the CR arrival distribution. It was found that the level of chaos in a trajectory is linked to the time the particles remain trapped in the system. This relation is described by a power law that could prove to be inherently characteristic of the system. Also, the arrival distribution maps show areas where the different chaotic behaviors are present, which can constitute a source of time-variability in the CR maps and can prove critical in understanding the anisotropy on Earth.