Electron thermalization and photon emission from magnetized compact sources

TL;DR

This paper provides comprehensive calculations of electron thermalization and photon emission in magnetized astrophysical sources, solving coupled kinetic equations self-consistently without approximations, relevant for black hole coronae.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, self-consistent method for modeling electron and photon distributions in magnetized environments, improving accuracy over previous approximate approaches.

Findings

First self-consistent solution of coupled electron-photon kinetic equations.

Accurate modeling of electron thermalization and photon emission processes.

Potential applications to astrophysical black hole coronae.

Abstract

We present detailed calculations of the electron thermalization by synchrotron self-absorption accounting for cooling by Compton scattering. For the first time, we solve coupled kinetic equations for electrons and photons without any approximations on the relevant cross-sections and compute self-consistently the resulting electron and photon distributions. The results presented in this contribution may be applied to the magnetized coronae around Galactic black hole accretion disks.