Cosmic-ray propagation with DRAGON2: II. Nuclear interactions with the interstellar gas [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.09616


Understanding the isotopic composition of cosmic rays (CRs) observed near Earth represents a milestone towards the identification of their origin. Local fluxes contain all the known stable and long-lived isotopes, reflecting the complex history of primaries and secondaries as they transverse the interstellar medium. For that reason, a numerical code which aims at describing the CR transport in the Galaxy must unavoidably rely on accurate modelling of the production of secondary particles. In this work, we provide a detailed description of the nuclear cross sections and decay network as implemented in the forthcoming release of the galactic propagation code DRAGON2. We present a comprehensive collection of the most recent secondary production models and we apply the different prescriptions to compute quantities of interest to interpret local CR fluxes (e.g., nuclear fragmentation timescales, secondary and tertiary source terms). The production of nuclear secondaries by spallation is obtained by fitting existing empirical or semi-empirical prescriptions to a large sample of existing measurements in the energy range 100 MeV/n to 100 GeV/n. We additionally consider the contribution of almost all the known decaying isotopes up to iron. The results presented here can be used to gauge the perspectives of recent experiments, e.g. AMS-02, to scrutinize direct measurements in search of non-standard contribution.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Evoli, D. Gaggero, A. Vittino, et. al.
Tue, 28 Nov 17
69/82

Comments: 25 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Comments are welcome