The residence time of cosmic rays (CRs) in the Galaxy is usually inferred from the measurement of the ratio of secondary-to-primary nuclei, such as the boron (B)/carbon (C) ratio, which provides an estimate of the amount of matter traversed by CRs during their propagation, the so called CR grammage. However, after being released by their parent sources, for instance supernova remnants (SNRs), CRs must cross the disc of the Galaxy, before entering the much lower density halo, in which they are believed to spend most of the time before eventually escaping the Galaxy. In the near-source region, the CR propagation is shown to be dominated by the non-linear self-generation of waves. Here we show that due to this effect, the time that CRs with energies up to $\sim$ 10 TeV spend within a distance $L_{c}\sim 100$ pc from the sources is much larger than naive estimates would suggest. The corresponding grammage is close to current estimates of the total grammage traversed throughout the whole Galaxy. Moreover, there is an irreducible grammage that CRs traverse while trapped downstream of the shock that accelerated them, though this contribution is rather uncertain. We conclude that at energies $\lesssim 1$ TeV, the observed grammage is heavily affected by the near-source non-linear trapping of CRs, and at energies $\gtrsim 1$ TeV it is affected by the source grammage. As a result, the measurement of the B/C ratio should be used very cautiously as an indicator of the propagation of CRs on large Galactic scales.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for Publication in Phys. Rev.

Cosmic rays (CRs) govern the energetics of present-day galaxies and might have also played a pivotal role during the Epoch of Reionization. In particular, energy deposition by low-energy (E 10 MeV) CRs accelerated by the first supernovae, might have heated and ionized the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) well before (z ≈ 20) it was reionized, significantly adding to the similar effect by X-rays or dark matter annihilations. Using a simple, but physically motivated reionization model, and a thorough implementation of CR energy losses, we show that CRs contribute negligibly to IGM ionization, but heat it substantially, raising its temperature by ∆T = 10 − 200 K by z = 10, depending on the CR injection spectrum. Whether this IGM pre-heating is uniform or clustered around the first galaxies depends on CR diffusion, in turn governed by the efficiency of self-confinement due to plasma streaming instabilities that we discuss in detail. This aspect is crucial to interpret future HI 21 cm observations which can be used to gain unique information on the strength and structure of early intergalactic magnetic fields, and the efficiency of CR acceleration by the first supernovae.

The propagation of particles accelerated at supernova remnant shocks and escaping the parent remnants is likely to proceed in a strongly non-linear regime, due to the efficient self-generation of Alfvén waves excited through streaming instability near the sources. Depending on the amount of neutral hydrogen present in the regions around the sites of supernova explosions, cosmic rays may accumulate an appreciable grammage in the same regions and get self-confined for non-negligible times, which in turn results in an enhanced rate of production of secondaries. Here we calculate the contribution to the diffuse gamma-ray background due to the overlap along lines of sight of several of these extended halos as due to pion production induced by self-confined cosmic rays. We find that if the density of neutrals is low, the halos can account for a substantial fraction of the diffuse emission observed by Fermi-LAT, depending on the orientation of the line of sight with respect to the direction of the Galactic centre.

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The evolution of the filamentation instability produced by two counter-streaming, ultrarelativistic pair plasmas is studied with particle-in-cell simulations. Radiation friction effects are taken into account. Two dimensional simulations are performed for both cases of the initial momenta being perpendicular (T -mode) or parallel (P -mode) to the simulation plane. In the initial stage the instability is purely transverse for both modes and generates small-scale filaments which later merge into larger structures. Particle acceleration leads to a strong broadening of the energy spectrum with the formation of a peak at twice the initial energy for the T -mode. In the nonlinear stage significant differences between T -and P -modes in the evolution of the fields and in the spectra of accelerated particles are apparent. The presence of radiative losses does not change the dynamics of the instability but strongly affects the structure of the particle spectra in the ultra-relativistic regime (particle energy > 100 MeV) and for high plasma densities (> 10 21 cm −3 ).