pith. sign in

arxiv: 1803.02640 · v3 · pith:24BHKGITnew · submitted 2018-03-07 · 🌌 astro-ph.HE · hep-ph

Two-zone diffusion of electrons and positrons from Geminga explains the positron anomaly

classification 🌌 astro-ph.HE hep-ph
keywords diffusionpositronpositronselectronsexcessfluxgemingalocal
0
0 comments X
read the original abstract

The recent HAWC observations of very-high-energy $\gamma$-ray halo around Geminga and Monogem indicate a very slow diffusion of cosmic rays, which results in tiny contribution of positrons from these two pulsars to the local flux. This makes the cosmic positron excess anomaly observed by PAMELA and AMS-02 even more puzzling. However, from the Boron-to-Carbon ratio data one can infer that the average diffusion coefficient in the Galaxy should be much larger. In this work we propose a two-zone diffusion model that the diffusion is slow only in a small region around the source, outside of which the propagation is as fast as usual. We find that such a scenario can naturally explain the positron excess data with parameters even more reasonable than that in the conventional one-zone diffusion model. The reason is that during the life time of Geminga ($\sim 300$ kyr) the electrons/positrons have propagated too far away with a fast diffusion and lead to a low local flux. The slow diffusion region in the two-zone model helps to confine the electrons/positrons for a long time and lead to an enhancement of the local flux. So under the constraint of the HAWC observations, pulsars are still the probable origin of the cosmic-ray positron excess.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. PHECT: A lightweight computation tool for pulsar halo emission

    astro-ph.HE 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PHECT is a configurable computation tool for pulsar halo gamma-ray emission using multiple transport models and stable finite-volume discretizations.

  2. On the contribution of the bow shock pulsar wind nebula PSR J0437-4715 to the observed fluxes of GeV-TeV positrons and antiprotons

    astro-ph.HE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The bow shock pulsar wind nebula around PSR J0437-4715 explains the GeV-TeV positron excess and hundreds-of-GeV antiproton flux with an energy-independent ratio by using 25% of the pulsar's wind power.

  3. Constraining the slow-diffusion zone size and electron injection spectral index for the Geminga pulsar halo

    astro-ph.HE 2023-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A two-zone diffusion model fitted to HAWC morphology and spectrum data constrains Geminga's slow-diffusion zone to 30-70 pc and injection index p ≤ 2.17, reproducing AMS-02 positrons as a derived outcome.