Secondary cosmic-ray nuclei in the Galactic halo model with nonlinear Landau damping

TL;DR

This paper presents a model of cosmic-ray propagation in the Galactic halo driven by self-generated turbulence with nonlinear Landau damping, successfully fitting observational data and suggesting further improvements with ion-neutral damping effects.

Contribution

The paper introduces a cosmic-ray halo model based on nonlinear Landau damping controlling turbulence, providing a better fit to observational data than previous models.

Findings

Model accurately reproduces observed cosmic-ray spectra.

Self-generated turbulence with nonlinear Landau damping explains CR confinement.

Ion-neutral damping may improve low-energy spectral fits.

Abstract

We employed our recent model of the cosmic-ray (CR) halo to compute the Galactic spectra of stable and unstable secondary nuclei. In this model, confinement of the Galactic CRs is entirely determined by the self-generated Alfvenic turbulence whose spectrum is controlled by nonlinear Landau damping. We analyzed the physical parameters affecting propagation characteristics of CRs and estimated the best set of free parameters providing accurate description of available observational data. We also show that agreement with observations at lower energies may be further improved by taking into account the effect of ion-neutral damping that operates near the Galactic disk.