A study on the sharp knee and fine structures of cosmic ray spectra

Abstract

The paper investigates the overall and detailed features of cosmic ray (CR) spectra in the knee region using the scenario of nuclei-photon interactions around the acceleration sources. Young supernova remnants can be the physical realities of such kind of CR acceleration sites. The results show that the model can well explain the following problems simultaneously with one set of source parameters: the knee of CR spectra and the sharpness of the knee, the detailed irregular structures of CR spectra, the so-called "component B" of Galactic CRs, and the electron/positron excesses reported by recent observations. The coherent explanation serves as evidence that at least a portion of CRs might be accelerated at the sources similar to young supernova remnants, and one set of source parameters indicates that this portion mainly comes from standard sources or from a single source.

13 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy.

References in corpus (13)

• Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation
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• All-particle primary energy spectrum in the 3-200 PeV energy range
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Fermi Large Area Telescope detection of gamma-ray emission from the direction of supernova iPTF14hls
• Spatial Dependent Diffusion of Cosmic Rays and the Excess of Primary Electrons Derived from High Precision Measurements by AMS-02
• On the knee of Galactic cosmic rays in light of sub-TeV spectral hardenings
• Electron and positron spectra in the three dimensional spatial-dependent propagation model
• Possible bump structure of cosmic ray electrons unveiled by AMS-02 data and its common origin along with the nuclei and positron
• On the Galactic Center Being the Main Source of Galactic Cosmic Rays as Evidenced by Recent Cosmic Ray and Gamma Ray Observations
• On the PeV knee of cosmic rays spectrum and TeV cutoff of electron spectrum
• Two-stage acceleration of interstellar ions due to the interaction of high-energy lepton plasma flow