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Self-consistent model of cosmic ray penetration into molecular clouds: Effect of energy losses

D. O. Chernyshov1,*, A. V. Ivlev2,†, and V. A. Dogiel1

  • *Contact author: chernyshov@lpi.ru
  • †Contact author: ivlev@mpe.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 083045 – Published 17 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/kkmh-5by1

Abstract

The theory of cosmic-ray (CR) penetration into dense molecular clouds developed recently for relativistic particles by Chernyshov et al. (2024) is extended to nonrelativistic CRs. Interstellar CRs propagating into the clouds are able to resonantly excite magnetohydrodynamic waves in diffuse cloud envelopes. This leads to the self-modulation, such that particles are scattered off of the self-generated waves. In contrast to relativistic CRs, transport of lower-energy particles in the envelopes is generally heavily affected by ionization losses; furthermore, both CR protons and electrons contribute to wave excitation. We show that these effects have profound impact on the self-modulation, and can dramatically reduce CR spectra even for clouds with moderate column densities of a few times 1021  cm−2.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 083045– Published 17 October, 2025
  • Received 13 June 2025
  • Accepted 2 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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