Testing universality of cosmic-ray acceleration with proton/helium data from AMS and Voyager-1

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment onboard the International Space Station (ISS) has recently measured the proton and helium spectra in cosmic rays (CRs) in the GeV-TeV energy region. The spectra of proton and helium are found to progressively harden at rigidity R=pc/Ze≳ 200 GV, while the proton-to-helium ratio as function of rigidity is found to fall off steadily as p/He ∝R-0.08. The decrease of the p/He ratio is often interpreted in terms of particle-dependent acceleration, which is in contrast with the universal nature of diffusive-shock-acceleration mechanisms. A different explanation is that the p-He anomaly originates from a flux transition between two components: a sub-TeV flux component (L) provided by hydrogen-rich supernova remnants with soft acceleration spectra, and a multi-TeV component (G) injected by younger sources with amplified magnetic fields and hard spectra. In this scenario the universality of particle acceleration is not violated because both source components provide composition-blind injection spectra. The present work is aimed at testing the universality of CR acceleration using the low-energy part of the CR flux, which is expected to be dominated by the L-type component. However, at kinetic energy of ∼0.5-10 GeV, the CR fluxes are significantly affected by energy losses and solar modulation, hence a proper modeling of Galactic and heliospheric propagation is required. To set the key properties of the L-source component, I have used the Voyager-1 data collected in the interstellar space. To compare my calculations with the AMS data, I have performed a determination of the force-field modulation parameter using neutron monitor measurements. I will show that the recent p-He data reported by AMS and Voyager-1 are in good agreement with the predictions of such a scenario, supporting the hypothesis that CRs are released in the Galaxy by universal, composition-blind accelerators. At energies below ∼0.5 GeV/n, however, the model is found to underpredict the data collected by PAMELA from 2006 to 2010. This discrepancy is found to increase with increasing solar activity, reflecting an expected breakdown of the force-field approximation.