Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays in a Structured and Magnetized Universe

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  • 19 February 2003
Abstract
The interpretation of observed sky distributions of ultra high energy cosmic rays may be affected non-trivially by considerable deflection by cosmic magnetic fields in the local large scale structure of the universe. We simulate propagation of cosmic ray nucleons above 10^{19} eV in scenarios where both the source distribution and magnetic fields within about 50 Mpc from us are obtained from an unconstrained large scale structure simulation. We find that consistency of predicted sky distributions with current data above 4 x 10^{19} eV favors magnetic fields of ~0.1 microGauss in our immediate environment, and a nearby source density of ~10^{-4}-10^{-3} Mpc^{-3}. At ~10^{19} eV an additional isotropic, presumably cosmological flux component should dominate the local component by about a factor three to be consistent with isotropy. We also discuss how future large scale full-sky detectors such as the Pierre Auger project will allow to put much more stringent constraints on source and magnetic field distributions.

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