Cosmic ray drift, the second knee and galactic anisotropies

Abstract

We show that the second knee in the cosmic ray spectrum (i.e. the steepening occurring at $E\simeq 4\times 10^{17}$ eV) could be related to drift effects affecting the heaviest nuclear component, the iron group nuclei, in a scenario in which the knee at $3\times 10^{15}$ eV indicates the onset of drift effects in the lighter proton component. We also study the anisotropies resulting from diffusion and drift currents in the Galaxy, showing their potential relevance to account for the AGASA observations at $E\sim 10^{18}$ eV, before the extragalactic component becomes dominant.

10 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Models of the Knee in the Energy Spectrum of Cosmic Rays
• Diffusion and drift of cosmic rays in highly turbulent magnetic fields
• The AGASA/SUGAR Anisotropies and TeV Gamma Rays from the Galactic Center: A Possible Signature of Extremely High-energy Neutrons
• Cosmic ray spectrum and anisotropies from the knee to the second knee
• Progress in high-energy cosmic ray physics
• Extragalactic cosmic rays diffusing from two populations of sources
• Rigidity dependent knee and cosmic ray induced high energy neutrino fluxes
• Decaying neutron propagation in the Galaxy and the Cosmic Ray anisotropy at 1 EeV
• A scenario for the Galactic cosmic rays between the knee and the second-knee
• Detectable neutrino fluxes due to enhanced cosmic ray densities in the Galactic Center region
• Measurements and implications of cosmic ray anisotropies from TeV to trans-EeV energies
• Energy dependence of the knee in the cosmic ray spectrum across the Milky Way
• Cosmic ray mass composition measurement in the energy range from $10^{16.5}$ eV to $10^{18.5}$ eV observed with the TALE hybrid detector
• Joint constraint on the propagation origin of the cosmic-ray spectral knee from energy spectrum and anisotropy observations