Unfolding Drift Effects for Cosmic Rays over the Period of the Sun’s Magnetic Field Reversal

Abstract

A well-established, comprehensive 3D numerical modulation model is applied to simulate galactic protons, electrons, and positrons from 2011 May to 2015 May, including the solar magnetic polarity reversal of Solar Cycle 24. The objective is to evaluate how simulations compare with corresponding Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer observations for 1.0–3.0 GV and what underlying physics follows from this comparison to improve our understanding of how the major physical modulation processes change, especially particle drift, from a negative to a positive magnetic polarity cycle. Apart from their local interstellar spectra, electrons and positrons differ only in their drift patterns, but they differ with protons in other ways such as adiabatic energy changes at lower rigidity. In order to complete the simulations for oppositely charged particles, antiproton modeling results are also obtained. Together, observations and corresponding modeling indicate the difference in the drift pattern before and after the recent polarity reversal and clarify to a large extent the phenomenon of charge-sign dependence during this period. The effect of global particle drift became negligible during this period of no well-defined magnetic polarity. The resulting low values of particles’ mean free paths (MFPs) during the polarity reversal contrast their large values during solar minimum activity and as such expose the relative contributions and effects of the different modulation processes from solar minimum to maximum activity. We find that the drift scale starts recovering just after the polarity reversal, but the MFPs keep decreasing or remain unchanged for some time after the polarity reversal.