Galactic pulsar population and the origin of high-energy cosmic rays

Abstract

We show that assuming a simple cosmic ray (CR) acceleration scenario, where all the pulsar rotational energy is transformed into CR particles of the highest available energy at a given moment, one obtains particle fluxes of the order of the observed ones. We derive the energy spectrum of the produced particles assuming that the pulsar magnetic field decays with time. The slope of the spectrum for E > 1016 eV is determined by a power-law distribution of the pulsar initial periods and the knee in the spectrum at ∼3 × 1015 eV by the decay of the pulsar magnetic fields. Moreover, the pulsar parameters at birth, fitted to describe the CR energy spectrum, reconstruct reasonably well their present equilibrium population.