The role of electron capture decay in the precision era of Galactic cosmic-ray data

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.12801
• Publication Date: 2023-08-08
• Authors: Borchiellini, M.; Maurin, D.; Vecchi, M.
• Keywords: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); 13. Climate action; FOS: Physical sciences; Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; 7. Clean energy

8 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings for International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC) 2023<br/>Electron capture (EC) decay relies on attachment and stripping cross-sections, that in turn, depend on the atomic number of the nucleus. We revisit the impact of EC decay in the context of the high-precision cosmic-ray fluxes measured by the AMS-02 experiment. We derive the solution of the steady-state fluxes in a 1D thin disk model including EC decay. We compare our results with relevant elemental and isotopic fluxes and evaluate the impact of this process, given the precision of recent AMS-02, ACE-CRIS, SuperTIGER, and Voyager data. We find this impact to be at the level or larger than the precision of recently collected data for several species, e.g. $_{31}$Ga and $_{33}$As, indicating that EC decay must be properly taken into account in the calculation.<br/>