Cosmic‐Ray Propagation: Nonlinear Diffusion Parallel and Perpendicular to Mean Magnetic Field

Abstract

We consider the propagation of cosmic rays in turbulent magnetic fields. We use the models of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence that were tested in numerical simulations, in which the turbulence is injected on large scales and cascades to small scales. Our attention is focused on the models of the strong turbulence, but we also briefly discuss the effects that the weak turbulence and the slab Alfvenic perturbations can have. The latter are likely to emerge as a result of instabilities within the cosmic-ray fluid itself, e.g., beaming and gyroresonance instabilities of cosmic rays. To describe the interaction of cosmic rays with magnetic perturbations we develop a nonlinear formalism that extends the ordinary quasi-linear theory that is routinely used for the purpose. This allows us to avoid the usual problem of 90° scattering and enables our computation of the mean free path of cosmic rays. We apply the formalism to the cosmic-ray propagation in the Galactic halo and in the warm ionized medium. In addition, we address the issue of the transport of cosmic rays perpendicular to the mean magnetic field and show that the issue of cosmic-ray subdiffusion (i.e., propagation with retracing the trajectories backward, which slows down the diffusion) is only important for restricted cases when the ambient turbulence is far from what numerical simulations suggest to us. As a result, this work provides formalism that can be applied for calculating cosmic-ray propagation in a wide variety of circumstances.