High energy cosmic ray self-confinement close to extragalactic sources

The ultra-high energy cosmic rays observed at the Earth are most likely accelerated in extra-galactic sources. For the typical luminosities invoked for such sources, the electric current associated to the flux of cosmic rays that leave them is large. The associated plasma instabilities create magnetic fluctuations that can efficiently scatter particles. We argue that this phenomenon forces cosmic rays to be self-confined in the source proximity for energies $E<E_{\rm cut}$, where $E_{\rm cut}\approx 10^{7} L_{44}^{2/3}$ GeV for low background magnetic fields ($B_{0}\ll nG$). For larger values of $B_{0}$, cosmic rays are confined close to their sources for energies $E<E_{\rm cut}\approx 2\times 10^{8} \lambda_{10} L_{44}^{1/4} B_{-10}^{1/2}$ GeV, where $B_{-10}$ is the field in units of $0.1$ nG, $\lambda_{10}$ is its coherence lengths in units of 10 Mpc and $L_{44}$ is the source luminosity in units of $10^{44}$ erg/s.Comment: To Appear in Physical Review Letter

Positivity conditions for Hermitian symmetric functions

We introduce a countable collection of positivity classes for Hermitian symmetric functions on a complex manifold, and establish their basic properties. We study a related notion of stability. The first main result shows that, if the underlying matrix of coefficients of an entire Hermitian symmetric function has at most k positive eigenvalues, then it can lie in the k-th positivity class only if it is a squared norm. We establish a similar result for Hermitian symmetric functions on the total space of a holomorphic line bundle. Finally we study the positivity classes for a natural one-parameter family of Hermitian metrics on a power of the universal bundle over complex projective space; we obtain sharp information about the parameter values in order to be in the k-th class. The paper closes with some additional information about the case when k is 2, where a nonlinear version of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality arises.Comment: Dedicated to Yum-Yong Siu on the occasion of his sixtieth birthda