2012/10/30 by Matthew D. Kistler, Hasan Yüksel, Kistler, Matthew D. +4 · 2 citations
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Radiation Therapy and Dosimetry #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1210.8180
5 pages, 3 figures; added references and discussion, with contemporaneous responses to PRL referees, including of AMS-02 results
openalex publication_date 2012/10/30 · arxiv created 2021/10/05 · arxiv updated 2021/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Isotropic diffusion is a key assumption in many models of cosmic-ray electrons and positrons. We find that simulation results imply a critical energy of ~10-1000~GeV above which electrons and positrons can spend their entire lives in streams threading magnetic fields, due to energy losses. This would restrict the number of electron/positron sources contributing at Earth, likely leading to smooth electron/positron spectra, as is observed. For positrons, this could be as few as one, with an enhanced flux that would ease energetics concerns of a pulsar origin of the positron excess, or even zero, bringing dark matter to the fore. We conclude that ideas about electron/positron propagation must be revised and discuss implications for recent AMS-02 data.