Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Apr 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003aps..apr.p3003b&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, April Meeting, 2003, April 5-8, 2003 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, MEETING ID: APR03, abstract #P3.003
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
The process of diffusive acceleration of charged particles in shocked plasmas is widely invoked in astrophysics to account for the ubiquitous presence of signatures of non-thermal relativistic electrons and ions in the universe. This statistical energization mechanism, manifested in turbulent media, was first posited by Enrico Fermi in 1949 to explain the observed cosmic ray population, which exhibits an almost power-law distribution in rigidity. The absence of a momentum scale is a key characteristic of diffusive shock acceleration, and astrophysical systems generally only impose scales at the injection (low energy) and loss (high energy) ends of the particle spectrum. The existence of structure in the cosmic ray spectrum (the "knee") at around 3000 TeV has promoted contentions that there are at least two origins for cosmic rays, a galactic one supplying those up to the knee, and perhaps an extragalactic one that can explain even the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) seen at 1-300 EeV. Accounting for the UHECRs with familiar astrophysical sites of acceleration has historically proven difficult due to the need to assume high magnetic fields in order to reduce the shortest diffusive acceleration timescale, the ion gyroperiod, to meaningful values. Yet active galaxies and gamma-ray bursts remain strong and interesting candidate sources for UHECRs, turning the theoretical focus to relativistic shocks. This review summarizes properties of diffusive shock acceleration that are salient to the issue of UHECR generation. These include spectral indices, anisotropies, acceleration efficencies and timescales, as functions of the shock speed and mean field orientation, and also the degree of field turbulence. Astrophysical sites for UHECR production are also critiqued.
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