The dipole anisotropy of galactic cosmic rays

Abstract

The arrival directions of Galactic cosmic rays exhibit anisotropies up to the level of one per-mille over various angular scales. Recent observations of TeV-PeV cosmic rays show that the dipole anisotropy has a strong energy dependence with a phase-flip around 100 TeV. We argue that this behavior can be well understood by the combination of various effects: the anisotropic diffusion of cosmic rays, the presence of nearby sources, the Compton-Getting effect from our relative motion and the reconstruction bias of ground-based observatories.