Lithium-6 and Gamma Rays: Complementary Constraints on Cosmic-Ray   History
  The rare isotope 6Li is made only by cosmic rays, dominantly in alpha+alpha fusion reactions with ISM helium. Consequently, this nuclide provides a unique diagnostic of the history of cosmic rays in our Galaxy. The same hadronic cosmic-ray interactions also produce high-energy gamma rays (mostly via neutral pion production). Thus, hadronic gamma-rays and 6Li are intimately linked. Specifically, 6Li directly encodes the local cosmic-ray fluence over cosmic time, while extragalactic hadronic gamma rays encode an average cosmic-ray fluence over lines of sight out to the horizon. We examine this link and show how 6Li and gamma-rays can be used together to place important model-independent limits on the cosmic-ray history of our Galaxy and the universe. We first constrain gamma-ray production from ordinary Galactic cosmic rays, using the local 6Li abundance. We find that the solar 6Li abundance demands an accompanying extragalactic pionic gamma-ray intensity which exceeds that of the entire observed EGRB by a factor of 2-6. Possible explanations for this discrepancy are discussed. We then constrain Li production using recent determinations of extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGRB). We note that cosmic rays created during cosmic structure formation would lead to pre-Galactic Li production, which would act as a "contaminant" to the primordial 7Li content of metal-poor halo stars. We find the uncertainties in the observed EGRB are so large that we cannot exclude a pre-Galactic Li which is comparable to primordial 7Li. Our limits and their more model-dependent extensions will improve significantly with additional observations of 6Li in halo stars, and with improved measurements of the EGRB spectrum by GLAST. (Abriged abstract) 
Brian D. Fields and Tijana Prodanovic