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The Leptonic Field

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Cosmic Ray Diffusion in the Galaxy and Diffuse Gamma Emission

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Abstract

In this chapter I will discuss the leptonic part of CRs: electrons and positrons. This component has been matter of debate because—as I pointed out in the introduction—from recent measurements very interesting signs of either new astrophysical sources or even new physics came out.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See the latest talks by A.W. Strong (http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~aws/talks.html).

  2. 2.

    ATIC does not have a magnet and therefore is not able to discriminate between electrons and positrons.

  3. 3.

    A neutron star is the final stage in the evolution of a massive star: the life cycle of stars more massive than \(8\text{--} 10\) solar masses ends with a Supernova Explosion; the shock wave continues to propagate in the interstellar medium forming a Supernova Remnant and accelerating Cosmic Rays, while a compact object with very high density made of neutrons remains.

  4. 4.

    \({ \Lambda \rm CDM}\) stands for Lambda-Cold Dark Matter; \(\Lambda \) is the cosmological constant: is an important ingredient of the model since it allows an accelerated expansion of the Universe at present time; Cold Dark Matter is supposed to be the most important part of the matter content of the Universe: Cold means that it decoupled in non-relativistic regime.

  5. 5.

    see http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/millennium/.

  6. 6.

    see http://www.sdss.org/.

  7. 7.

    R-parity is a symmetry acting on the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) fields; all Standard Model particles have positive R-parity while supersymmetric particles have negative R-parity. So, if R-parity is conserved, a supersymmpetric particle cannot decay into a set of SM particles: for this reason the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) must be stable.

  8. 8.

    The measure refers to electrons+positrons since Fermi-LAT does not have a magnet and therefore is not able to distinguish between negative and positive particle, although recently a very interesting method based on the Earth magnetic field permitted to obtain the two spectra seprately: I will mention it at the end of the chapter.

  9. 9.

    Via Lactea simulation follows the growth of a Milky Way-size system in a \({\Lambda \rm CDM}\) Universe from redshift 104.3 to the present. The galaxy-forming region is sampled with \({\sim } 10^9\) particles of mass \({\sim } 4\) times the Solar mass. The simulation reveals the fractal nature of Dark Matter clustering: isolated halos and subhalos contain the same relative amount of substructure and both have cuspy inner density profiles.

  10. 10.

    In that paper the authors follow a similar approach and find that, for reasonable assumptions on the parameter of both local and distant sources, the current observations can be reproduced by a smooth distant contribution plus a collection of local pulsars and SNRs with no need for exotic contributions: such a finding is similar to our result. Moreover, they investigate the systematic uncertainties that turn out to be high: in particular, the spectral shape at high energy appears to be weakly correlated with the spectral indices of local sources, but more strongly with the hierarchy in their distance, age and power.

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  1. Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)—Sezione di Pisa, Largo Pontecorvo 3, Pisa, 56127, Italy

    Dr. Daniele Gaggero

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Gaggero, D. (2012). The Leptonic Field. In: Cosmic Ray Diffusion in the Galaxy and Diffuse Gamma Emission. Springer Theses. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29949-0_5

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