Cosmic rays and grain alignment

The recent detection of interstellar polarization in the solid CO feature near 4.67 μm shows that CO-mantled grains can be aligned in cold molecular clouds. These observations conflict with a theory of grain alignment which attributes the polarization in molecular clouds to the effects of cosmic rays: according to this theory, oblate spheroidal grains with H2O- and CO2-dominated ice mantles are spun up to suprathermal energies by molecular evaporation from cosmic ray impact sites, but spin-up does not occur for CO-mantled grains. Motivated by this conflict, we re-examine the effects of cosmic rays on the alignment of icy grains. We show that the systematic torques produced by cosmic rays are insufficient to cause suprathermal spin. In principle, the random torques due to cosmic rays can enhance the efficiency of Davis-Greenstein alignment by raising the grain rotational temperature. However, a significant enhancement would require cosmic ray fluxes 6–7 orders of magnitude larger than the flux in a typical cold cloud.