Parametric model for astrophysical proton-proton interactions

Abstract: Observations of gamma-rays have been made from objects such as active galaxies and supernova remnants and also as diffuse emission from the Galactic ridge. The study of gamma-rays can provide information about production mechanisms and tell us about cosmic ray acceleration. In the high energy regime, the dominant mechanism for gamma-ray production is the decay of neutral pions produced in interactions of accelerated cosmic ray nuclei and interstellar matter. Having an accurate model for this is an integral part in the study of gamma-rays and the sources in which they are produced.We present here a parametric model for calculations of inclusive cross sections for stable secondary particles (gamma-rays, electrons, positrons, nue, anti nue, numu and anti numu) produced in proton-proton interactions. The model is based on the up-to-date proton-proton interaction model by Kamae et al., which includes the diffraction dissociation process, violation of the Feynman scaling law and the logarithmically rising inelastic proton-proton cross section. To improve fidelity to experimental data for lower energies, two baryon resonance excitation processes were added to the model: one representing the Δ(1232) and the other multiple resonances with masses around 1600 MeV/c^2. The parametric model predicts the spectra for all secondary particles to be harder by about 0.05 in power-law index than that of the incident proton and their inclusive cross sections to be larger than those predicted by previous models based on Feynman scaling. The transverse momentum distributions for gamma-rays have also been calculated from the described proton-proton interaction model, showing the potential of also having a parametric model for the transverse momentum distributions.