Effects of the Galactic Magnetic Field on the UHECR Correlation Studies with Starburst Galaxies

Abstract

We estimate the biases caused by the coherent deflection of cosmic rays due to the Galactic magnetic field (GMF) in maximum likelihood analyses for searches of ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray sources in the literature. We simulate mock event data sets with a set of assumptions for the starburst galaxy source model, coherent deflection by a GMF model, and mixed-mass composition. We then conduct a maximum likelihood analysis without accounting for the GMF in the same manner as previous studies. We find that the anisotropic fraction f _ani is estimated to be systematically lower than the true value. We estimate the true parameters that are compatible with the best-fit parameters that were reported, and find that except for a narrow region with a large anisotropic fraction and a small separation angular scale, a wide parameter space is still compatible with the experimental results. We also develop a maximum likelihood method that takes the GMF model into account and confirm in Monte Carlo simulations that we can estimate the true parameters within a 1 σ contour under the ideal condition that we know the event-by-event mass and the GMF.

Keywords

• Cosmic ray astronomy
• Cosmic ray sources
• Cosmic rays
• Ultra-high-energy cosmic radiation