Galactic Gas Models Strongly Affect the Determination of the Diffusive Halo Height

2024/08/09 by Luque, Pedro De La Torre, Linden, Tim · 1 citation
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.05179

Abstract

The height of the Milky Way diffusion halo, above which cosmic-rays can freely escape the galaxy, is among the most critical, yet poorly known, parameters in cosmic-ray physics. Measurements of radioactive secondaries, such as ¹⁰Be or ²⁶Al, which decay equivalently throughout the diffusive volume, are expected to provide the strongest constraints. This has motivated significant observational work to constrain their isotopic ratios, along with theoretical work to constrain the cross-section uncertainties that are thought to dominate radioactive secondary fluxes. In this work, we show that the imprecise modelling of the Milky Way spiral arms significantly affects our ability to translate ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al fluxes into constraints on the diffusive halo height, biasing our current results. Utilizing state-of-the-art spiral arms models we produce new predictions for the ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al fluxes that motivate upcoming measurements by AMS-02 and HELIX.

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