"Spectrally-Resolved Primary and Secondary Cosmic Ray Nuclei in the Interstellar Medium"

Abstract:

Cosmic Rays (CRs), relativistic charged subatomic particles traveling through the (inter)galactic medium, represent an important energetic component of the interstellar medium. They are also involved in high-energy processes that produce gamma rays and X-rays. Their propagation poses challenges for experiments, theory, and numerical simulations, and many codes (RAMSES, GALPROP, etc.) have been developed to investigate CR physics in galaxies. One important clue to the understanding of CR is to model their transport in a magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) environment, which is nowadays the most faithful way to reproduce galactic dynamics with magnetic field structure. For this purpose, the PIERNIK MHD code and its CRESP (Cosmic Ray Energy SPectrum) algorithm were designed.

In my talk, I will first introduce the main ideas of galactic CR physics. Then I will present my PhD work to model the propagation of spectrally-resolved primary and secondary nuclei in a dynamical MHD environment within CRESP. I will show results on the primary to secondary ratio and unstable to stable isotope ratios, which indicate that those observables are strongly dependent on the CR-ISM coupling.