Beryllium isotopic composition and Galactic cosmic ray propagation

Abstract

The isotopic composition of beryllium nuclei and its energy dependence encode information of fundamental importance about the propagation of cosmic rays in the Galaxy. The effects of decay on the spectrum of the unstable beryllium--10 isotope can be described introducing the average survival probability $P_{\rm surv} (E_0)$ that can inferred from measurements of the isotopic ratio Be10/Be9 if one has sufficiently good knowledge of the nuclear fragmentation cross sections that determine the isotopic composition of beryllium nuclei at injection. The average survival probability can then be interpreted in terms of propagation parameters, such as the cosmic ray average age, adopting a theoretical framework for Galactic propagation. Recently the AMS02 Collaboration has presented preliminary measurements of the beryllium isotopic composition that extend the observations to a broad energy range ($E_0 \simeq 0.7$-12 GeV/n) with small errors. In this work we discuss the average survival probability that can be inferred from the preliminary AMS02 data, adopting publically available models of the nuclear fragmentation cross sections, and interpret the results in the framework of a simple diffusion model, This study shows that the effects of decay decrease more slowly than the predictions, resulting in an average cosmic ray age that increases with energy. An alternative possibility is that the cosmic ray age distribution is broader than in the models that are now commonly accepted, suggesting that the Galactic confinement volume has a non trivial structure and is formed by an inner halo contained in an extended one.