April 16-19, 2012

The aim of this Workshop was to address the the relationship between cosmic-ray acceleration in shells and their interaction in nearby molecular clouds can at last be studied observationally with an increasing degree of precision, shedding light on the diffusion properties of cosmic-rays in different Galactic environments. Additionally to this traditional astroparticle focus for understanding the propagation of the highest energy cosmic-rays, molecular abundance ratios could turn out to be a new way to trace the presence of cosmic rays and to infer their fluxes, given that observed abundance enhancements could be due to ionization by X-rays and/or interactions of low-energy CRs with gas and dust. Finally, the fluorescent Fe K? line at 6.4 keV is also detected from molecular clouds in the Galactic center region and can be accounted for in terms of the impact of low-energy CRs with neutral gas in the clouds. The meeting addressed all these topics.

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