GALPROP: modeling cosmic ray propagation and associated interstellar emissions

Research in many areas of modern physics and astrophysics such as, e.g., indirect searches for dark matter (DM), particle acceleration in SNR shocks, and the spectrum and origin of extragalactic gamma-ray background, rely heavily on studies of cosmic rays (CRs) and associated diffuse emissions. New or improved instrumentation to explore these open issues is ready or under development. A fleet of ground-based, balloon-borne, and spacecraft instruments measures many CR species, gamma rays, radio, and synchrotron emission. Exploiting the data collected by the scientific missions to the fullest requires reliable and detailed calculations using a numerical model. GALPROP is the current state-of-the-art numerical CR propagation code that has become a standard analysis tool in CR and diffuse gamma-ray research. It uses astrophysical information, nuclear and particle data as input to self-consistently predict CRs, gamma rays, synchrotron emission and other observables. This paper reviews recent GALPROP developments and results.Comment: Invited talk at 8th Workshop on Science with the New Generation of High Energy Gamma-ray Experiments: Gamma-ray Astrophysics in the Multimessenger Context (SciNeGHE2010, Trieste, Sept. 8-10, 2010); Il Nuovo Cimento C, v. 034, published onlin

Identifying Dark Matter Burners in the Galactic center

If the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of our Galaxy grew adiabatically, then a dense "spike" of dark matter is expected to have formed around it. Assuming that dark matter is composed primarily of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a star orbiting close enough to the SMBH can capture WIMPs at an extremely high rate. The stellar luminosity due to annihilation of captured WIMPs in the stellar core may be comparable to or even exceed the luminosity of the star due to thermonuclear burning. The model thus predicts the existence of unusual stars, i.e. "WIMP burners", in the vicinity of an adiabatically grown SMBH. We find that the most efficient WIMP burners are stars with degenerate electron cores, e.g. white dwarfs (WD) or degenerate cores with envelopes. If found, such stars would provide evidence for the existence of particle dark matter and could possibly be used to establish its density profile. In our previous paper we computed the luminosity from WIMP burning for a range of dark matter spike density profiles, degenerate core masses, and distances from the SMBH. Here we compare our results with the observed stars closest to the Galactic center and find that they could be consistent with WIMP burners in the form of degenerate cores with envelopes. We also cross-check the WIMP burner hypothesis with the EGRET observed flux of gamma-rays from the Galactic center, which imposes a constraint on the dark matter spike density profile and annihilation cross-section. We find that the EGRET data is consistent with the WIMP burner hypothesis. New high precision measurements by GLAST will confirm or set stringent limits on a dark matter spike at the Galactic center, which will in turn support or set stringent limits on the existence of WIMP burners at the Galactic center.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures; to appear in the Proc. of the First Int. GLAST Symp. (Stanford, Feb. 5-8, 2007), eds. S.Ritz, P.F.Michelson, and C.Meegan, AIP Conf. Pro

Direct measurements of cosmic rays and their possible interpretations

The last two decades have brought spectacular advances in astrophysics of cosmic rays (CRs) and space- and ground-based astronomy. Launches of missions that employ forefront detector technologies enabled measurements with large effective areas, wide fields of view, and precision that we recently could not even dream of. Meanwhile, interpretation of the individual slices of information about the internal working of the Milky Way provided by such experiments poses challenges to the traditional astrophysical models. New mysteries arise in the composition and spectra of CR species at low and high energies, in the energy range where we thought the main features were already understood fairly well. This accumulation of unsolved puzzles highlights the peculiarity of the current epoch and means that major breakthroughs are still ahead. In my talk, I review the current state of direct measurements of CRs and discuss their possible interpretations. Unfortunately, many important ideas and publications are not discussed here due to the space limitations.Comment: 24 pages, invited review talk, Proceedings of the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023), 26 July - 3 August, 2023, Nagoya, Japan. The DOI link provides an access to the slides (Supplementary files

Designing Algorithms for Optimization of Parameters of Functioning of Intelligent System for Radionuclide Myocardial Diagnostics

The influence of the number of complex components of Fast Fourier transformation in analyzing the polar maps of radionuclide examination of myocardium at rest and stress on the functional efficiency of the system of diagnostics of pathologies of myocardium was explored, and there were defined their optimum values in the information sense, which allows increasing the efficiency of the algorithms of forming the diagnostic decision rules by reducing the capacity of the dictionary of features of recognition.The information-extreme sequential cluster algorithms of the selection of the dictionary of features, which contains both quantitative and category features were developed and the results of their work were compared. The modificatios of the algorithms of the selection of the dictionary were suggested, which allows increasing both the search speed of the optimal in the information sense dictionary and reducing its capacity by 40 %. We managed to get the faultless by the training matrix decision rules, the accuracy of which is in the exam mode asymptotically approaches the limit.It was experimentally confirmed that the implementation of the proposed algorithm of the diagnosing system training has allowed to reduce the minimum representative volume of the training matrix from 300 to 81 vectors-implementations of the classes of recognition of the functional myocardium state

A New Determination Of The Diffuse Galactic and Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Emission

The GALPROP model for cosmic-ray propagation is able to make explicit predictions for the distribution of galactic diffuse gamma-rays. We compare different propagation models with gamma-ray spectra measured by EGRET for various regions of the sky. This allows sensitive tests of alternative explanations for the apparent excess emission observed at GeV gamma-rays. We find that a population of hard-spectrum gamma-ray sources cannot be solely responsible for the excess since it also appears at high latitudes; on the other hand a hard cosmic-ray electron spectrum cannot explain the gamma-ray excess in the inner Galaxy. By normalizing the cosmic ray spectra within reasonable bounds under preservation of their shape we are able to obtain our best prediction of the Galactic component of diffuse gamma rays, and show that away from the Galactic plane it gives an accurate prediction of the observed gamma-ray intensities. On this basis we reevaluate the extragalactic gamma-ray background. We find that for some energies previous work underestimated the Galactic contribution and hence overestimated the background. The new EGRB spectrum shows a positive curvature similar to that expected for models of the extragalactic gamma-ray emission based on contributions from unresolved blazars.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl