Entropy and the Cosmic Ray Particle Energy Distribution Power Law Exponent

Abstract: We consider the hypothesis that cosmic rays are emitted from the surfaces of neutron stars by a process of evaporation from an internal nuclear liquid to a dilute external gas which constitutes the "vacuum". On this basis, we find an inverse power in the energy distribution with a power law exponent of 2.701178 in excellent agreement with the experimental value of 2.7. The heat of nuclear matter evaporation via the entropy allows for the computation of the exponent. The evaporation model employed is based on the entropy considerations of Landau and Fermi that have been applied to the liquid drop model of evaporation in a heavy nucleus excited by a collision. This model provides a new means of obtaining power law distributions for cosmic ray energy distributions and, remarkably, an actual value for the exponent which is in agreement with experiment and explains the otherwise puzzling smoothness of the cosmic ray energy distribution over a wide range of energies without discontinuities due to contributions from different sources required by current models.