Cosmic Ray Acceleration at Cosmological Shocks: Numerical Simulations of CR Modified Plane-Parallel Shocks

Mathematics – Logic

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Acceleration Of Particles, Cosmology, Cosmic Rays, Hydrodynamics, Methods: Numerical

Scientific paper

In order to explore the cosmic ray acceleration at the cosmological shocks, we have performed numerical simulations of one-dimensional, plane-parallel, cosmic ray (CR) modified shocks with the newly developed CRASH (Cosmic Ray Amr SHock) numerical code. Based on the hypothesis that strong Alfvén waves are self-generated by streaming CRs, the Bohm diffusion model for CRs is adopted. The code includes a plasma-physics-based ``injection'' model that transfers a small proportion of the thermal proton flux through the shock into low energy CRs for acceleration there. We found that, for strong accretion shocks with Mach numbers greater than 10, CRs can absorb most of shock kinetic energy and the accretion shock speed is reduced up to 20 %, compared to pure gas dynamic shocks. Although the amount of kinetic energy passed through accretion shocks is small, since they propagate into the low density intergalactic medium, they might possibly provide acceleration sites for ultra-high energy cosmic rays of E>1018eV. For internal/merger shocks with Mach numbers less than 3, however, the energy transfer to CRs is only about 10-20 % and so nonlinear feedback due to the CR pressure is insignificant. Considering that intracluster medium (ICM) can be shocked repeatedly, however, the CRs generated by these weak shocks could be sufficient to explain the observed non-thermal signatures from clusters of galaxies.

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