• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.97.123011
• Corpus ID: 55919768

Features in the spectrum of cosmic-ray positrons from pulsars

@article{Cholis2017FeaturesIT,
  title={Features in the spectrum of cosmic-ray positrons from pulsars},
  author={Ilias Cholis and Tanvi Karwal and Marc Kamionkowski},
  journal={Physical Review D},
  year={2017}
}

• I. Cholis, Tanvi Karwal, M. Kamionkowski
• Published 30 November 2017
• Physics
• Physical Review D

Pulsars have been invoked to explain the origin of recently observed high-energy Galactic cosmic-ray positrons. Since the positron propagation distance decreases with energy, the number of pulsars that can contribute to the observed positrons decreases from O(103) for positron energies E≳10  GeV to only a few for E≳500  GeV. Thus, if pulsars explain these positrons, the positron energy spectrum should become increasingly bumpy at higher energies. Here, we present a power-spectrum analysis that can be applied to seek such spectral features in the energy spectrum for cosmic-ray positrons and for the energy spectrum of the combined electron/positron flux. We account for uncertainties in the pulsar distribution by generating hundreds of simulated spectra from pulsar distributions consistent with current observational constraints. Although the current AMS-02 data do not exhibit evidence for spectral features, we find that such features would be detectable at the 2σ lavel in ≃10% of our simulations, with 20 years of AMS-02 data or three years of DAMPE measurements on the electron-plus-positron flux.