3,156 research outputs found
Effects of the galactic magnetic field upon large scale anisotropies of extragalactic Cosmic Rays
The large scale pattern in the arrival directions of extragalactic cosmic
rays that reach the Earth is different from that of the flux arriving to the
halo of the Galaxy as a result of the propagation through the galactic magnetic
field. Two different effects are relevant in this process: deflections of
trajectories and (de)acceleration by the electric field component due to the
galactic rotation. The deflection of the cosmic ray trajectories makes the flux
intensity arriving to the halo from some direction to appear reaching the Earth
from another direction. This applies to any intrinsic anisotropy in the
extragalactic distribution or, even in the absence of intrinsic anisotropies,
to the dipolar Compton-Getting anisotropy induced when the observer is moving
with respect to the cosmic rays rest frame. For an observer moving with the
solar system, cosmic rays traveling through far away regions of the Galaxy also
experience an electric force coming from the relative motion (due to the
rotation of the Galaxy) of the local system in which the field can be
considered as being purely magnetic. This produces small changes in the
particles momentum that can originate large scale anisotropies even for an
isotropic extragalactic flux.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory
The main results from the Auger Observatory are described. A steepening of
the spectrum is observed at the highest energies, supporting the expectation
that above eV the cosmic ray energies are significantly
degraded by interactions with the CMB photons (the GZK effect). This is further
supported by the correlations observed above eV with the
distribution of nearby active galaxies, which also show the potential of Auger
to start the era of charged particle astronomy. The lack of observation of
photons or neutrinos strongly disfavors top-down models, and these searches may
approach in the long term the sensitivity required to test the fluxes expected
from the secondaries of the very same GZK process. Bounds on the anisotropies
at EeV energies contradict hints from previous experiments that suggested a
large excess from regions near the Galactic centre or the presence of a dipolar
type modulation of the cosmic ray flux.Comment: 6 p., 8 figs., proceedings of the XXIII International Conference on
Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 08
Directed abelian algebras and their applications to stochastic models
To each directed acyclic graph (this includes some D-dimensional lattices)
one can associate some abelian algebras that we call directed abelian algebras
(DAA). On each site of the graph one attaches a generator of the algebra. These
algebras depend on several parameters and are semisimple. Using any DAA one can
define a family of Hamiltonians which give the continuous time evolution of a
stochastic process. The calculation of the spectra and ground state
wavefunctions (stationary states probability distributions) is an easy
algebraic exercise. If one considers D-dimensional lattices and choose
Hamiltonians linear in the generators, in the finite-size scaling the
Hamiltonian spectrum is gapless with a critical dynamic exponent . One
possible application of the DAA is to sandpile models. In the paper we present
this application considering one and two dimensional lattices. In the one
dimensional case, when the DAA conserves the number of particles, the
avalanches belong to the random walker universality class (critical exponent
). We study the local densityof particles inside large
avalanches showing a depletion of particles at the source of the avalanche and
an enrichment at its end. In two dimensions we did extensive Monte-Carlo
simulations and found .Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
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