2014ApJ...792L..14J

We investigate the diffusion of cosmic rays into molecular cloud complexes. Using the cosmic-ray diffusion formalism of Protheroe et al., we examine how cosmic rays diffuse into clouds exhibiting different density structures, including a smoothed step-function, as well as Gaussian and inverse-r density distributions, which are well known to trace the structure of star-forming regions. These density distributions were modeled as an approximation to the Galactic center cloud G0.216+0.016, a recently discovered massive dust clump that exhibits limited signs of massive star formation and thus may be the best region in the Galaxy to observe synchrotron emission from secondary electrons and positrons. Examination of the resulting synchrotron emission, produced by the interaction of cosmic-ray protons interacting with ambient molecular matter producing secondary electrons and positrons reveals that, due to projection effects, limb-brightened morphology results in all cases. However, we find that the Gaussian and inverse-r density distributions show much broader flux density distributions than step-function distributions. Significantly, some of the compact (compared to the 2.''2 resolution, 5.3 GHz Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) observations) sources show non-thermal emission, which may potentially be explained by the density structure and the lack of diffusion of cosmic rays into the cloud. We find that we can match the 5.3 and 20 GHz flux densities of the non-thermal source JVLA 1 and 6 from Rodríguez & Zapata with a local cosmic-ray flux density, a diffusion coefficient suppression factor of χ = 0.1-0.01 for a coefficient of 3x10²⁷/cm2/s, and a magnetic field strength of 470 µG.