Cosmic ray photodisintegration and the knee of the spectrum

CANDIA, JULIÁN; EPELE, LUIS N.; ROULET, ESTEBAN

Trieste, Italia

Workshop; Summer School on Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology; 2000

ICTP - Trieste

We explore in some detail the scenario proposed to explain the observed knee of the cosmic ray (CR) spectrum as due to the effects of photodisintegration of the CR nuclei by interactions with optical and soft UV photons in the source region. We show that the photon column densities needed to explain the experimental data are significantly lower than those obtained in previous estimations which neglected multinucleon emission in the photodisintegration process. We also treat more accurately the photodisintegration thresholds, we discuss the effects of photopion production processes and the neutron escape mechanism, identifying the physical processes responsible for the qualitative features of the results. This scenario would require the CR nuclei to traverse column densities of $sim 5 imes 10^{27}- 2 imes 10^{28}$~eV/cm$^2$ after being accelerated in order to reproduce the observed knee, and predicts that the CR composition should become lighter above $sim 10^{16}$~eV.