Modeling Cosmic-Ray Transport: A CRPropa based stochastic differential equation solver

TL;DR

This paper introduces an advanced stochastic differential equation solver based on CRPropa for modeling cosmic-ray transport in turbulent magnetic fields, enabling detailed simulations and analysis of particle behavior.

Contribution

It develops a generalized SDE solver within CRPropa, allowing for flexible modeling of cosmic-ray transport, including new test cases like continuous injection and pitch angle diffusion.

Findings

The SDE solver accurately models cosmic-ray transport in turbulent fields.

Focused pitch angle diffusion causes drift velocities along magnetic field lines.

The work provides a technical reference for future cosmic-ray transport studies.

Abstract

We present a new code that significantly extends CRPropa's capabilities to model the ensemble averaged transport of charged cosmic rays in arbitrary turbulent magnetic fields. The software is based on solving a set of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). In this work we give detailed instructions to transform a transport equation, usually given as a partial differential equation, into a Fokker-Planck equation and further into the corresponding set of SDEs. Furthermore, detailed tests of the algorithms are done and different sources of uncertainties are compared to each other. So to some extend, this work serves as a technical reference for existing and upcoming work using the new generalized SDE solver based on the CRPropa framework. On the other hand, the new flexibility allowed us to implement first test cases on continuous particle injection and focused pitch angle diffusion. For the latter one we show that focused pitch angle diffusion leads to a drift velocity along the field lines that is defined by the fixed points of the pitch angle diffusion equation.