Cosmic ray transport in anisotropic turbulence

This proposal aims to disclose new properties of cosmic-ray transport in the Universe. A fast numerical method is used to describe the propagation of cosmic-rays in anisotropic magnetic turbulence.

It is shown that this method allows exploring a range of particle energies that had remained prohibitive with previous computational efforts. The method has been implemented on an MPI-parallel test-particle code suitable for high-performance computing (HPC). Scaling tests of the code run on MELUXINA have shown excellent scalability up to thousands of cores.

The simulations proposed will assess how the turbulence anisotropy influences the transport of high-energy particles in the direction parallel and perpendicular to a large scale guide-field. Several large-scale runs will be performed varying particle energy on a broad range of scales and turbulence amplitude. Simulation results will be compared with existing results on particle transport in isotropic turbulence and with existing theories of charged particle diffusion.

The potential impact of the successful realisation of this project on cosmic ray physics is discussed. The project will be pursued by a team of scientists with complementary expertise in plasma physics, HPC, and particle astrophysics.