A Stochastic Processes Approach to Cosmic-Ray Transport

Abstract:

Cosmic rays are energetic particles (protons and ions) that originate from space and impinge on the Earth's atmosphere. The particles arrive at Earth with a variety of energies, due to the wide variety of their sources. The origins for some of these particles stem from energetic processes on the Sun, to supernovae explosions across the Galaxy, to unknown events across the Universe. In the 1960s, Eugene Parker developed a theory and equation to describe the propagation of cosmic rays as they travel through the turbulent magnetic fields in space. The Parker Transport equation is a (somewhat complicated) partial differential equation in a 4-dimensional phase space, which has been typically solved using some type of finite differencing method. In this talk, I review a recent paper that describes an alternative way of solving this equation by recasting it into a set of stochastic differential equations that are more readily solved.