Secondary Antiprotons and Propagation of Cosmic Rays in the Galaxy and Heliosphere

Abstract

High-energy collisions of cosmic-ray nuclei with interstellar gas are believed to be the mechanism producing the majority of cosmic-ray antiprotons. Because of the kinematics of the process, they are created with a nonzero momentum; the characteristic spectral shape with a maximum at ∼2 GeV and a sharp decrease toward lower energies makes antiprotons a unique probe of models for particle propagation in the Galaxy and modulation in the heliosphere. On the other hand, accurate calculation of the secondary antiproton flux provides a "background" for searches for exotic signals from the annihilation of supersymmetric particles and primordial black hole evaporation. Recently, new data with large statistics on both low- and high-energy antiproton fluxes have become available which allow such tests to be performed. We use our propagation code GALPROP to calculate interstellar cosmic-ray propagation for a variety of models. We show that there is no simple model capable of accurately describing the whole variety of data: boron/carbon and sub-iron/iron ratios, spectra of protons, helium, antiprotons, positrons, electrons, and diffuse γ-rays. We find that only a model with a break in the diffusion coefficient plus convection can reproduce measurements of cosmic-ray species, and the reproduction of primaries (p, He) can be further improved by introducing a break in the primary injection spectra. For our best-fit model we make predictions of proton and antiproton fluxes near the Earth for different modulation levels and magnetic polarity using a steady state drift model of propagation in the heliosphere.