Acceleration of galactic cosmic rays in shock waves

The old problem of the origin of cosmic rays has triggered off fresh interest owing to the discovery of a new model which enables a lot of energy to be transferred to a small number of particles on the one hand and the discovery of the coronal environment in which this transfer occurs, on the other. In this paper, interest is taken in the galactic cosmic rays and an endeavour is made to find out if the model can reveal the existence of cosmic rays over a wide energy range. The existence of an energy break, predicted by the model, was recognized fairly early but, in the literature, it varies from 30 GeV ro 106GeV according to the authors. A study has been made of the two main causes of an energy break: the sphericity of the shock and the life time of the shock wave