Reconciling the light component and all-particle cosmic ray energy spectra at the knee

Abstract

The knee phenomenon of the cosmic ray spectrum, which plays an important role in studying the acceleration mechanism of cosmic rays, is still an unsolved mystery. We try to reconcile the knee spectra measured by ARGO-YBJ and Tibet-III. A simple broken power-law model fails to explain the experimental data. Therefore a modified broken power-law model with non-linear acceleration effects is adopted, which can describe the sharp knee structure. This model predicts that heavy elements dominate at the knee.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Cosmic-Ray Proton and Helium Spectra from the First CREAM Flight
• Spectrum of cosmic-ray nucleons and the atmospheric muon charge ratio
• Cosmic Rays from the Knee to the Highest Energies
• Composition of Primary Cosmic-Ray Nuclei at High Energies
• CosRayMC: a global fitting method in studying the properties of the new sources of cosmic e${}^{\pm }$ excesses