Particle theory

Abstract:

The rise in the positron fraction, observed by PAMELA, Fermi-LAT and most recently by AMS-02, has created a lot of interest, fuelled by speculations about an origin in dark matter annihilation in the Galactic halo. However, other channels, e.g. antiprotons or gamma-rays, now severely constrain dark matter interpretations, thus requiring astrophysical sources of positrons. We have investigated the possibility that supernova remnants, the most likely sources of Galactic cosmic rays, can in fact also produce a hard spectrum of secondary positrons, by spallation and acceleration at the shock. This mechanism is guaranteed if hadronic CRs are present and would also lead to observable signatures in other secondary channels like the boron-to-carbon or antiproton-to-proton ratios. If such features were borne out by upcoming AMS-02 data, this would rule out other explanations.

Abstract:

We introduce a restricted hard dimer model on a random causal triangulation that is exactly solvable and generalizes a model recently proposed by Atkin and Zohren (2012 Phys. Lett. B 712 445–50). We show that the latter model exhibits unusual behaviour at its multicritical point; in particular, its Hausdorff dimension equals 3 and not $3/2$ as would be expected from general scaling arguments. When viewed as a special case of the generalized model introduced here we show that this behaviour is not generic and therefore is not likely to represent the true behaviour of the full dimer model on a random causal triangulation.