Acceleration and radiation of ultra-high energy protons in galaxy clusters

TL;DR

This paper models the acceleration of ultra-high energy protons in galaxy clusters, considering energy losses due to CMBR interactions, and predicts their broad-band emission, suggesting potential detectability with future instruments.

Contribution

It presents a self-consistent, time-dependent numerical model of proton acceleration in galaxy clusters including CMBR losses and predicts observable emission signatures.

Findings

Protons can reach energies above 10^18 eV in galaxy clusters.

Synchrotron and inverse Compton peaks are comparable in flux.

Emission in X-ray and gamma-ray bands may be detectable with future instruments.

Abstract

Clusters of galaxies are believed to be capable to accelerate protons at accretion shocks to energies exceeding 10^18 eV. At these energies, the losses caused by interactions of cosmic rays with photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) become effective and determine the maximum energy of protons and the shape of the energy spectrum in the cutoff region. The aim of this work is the study of the formation of the energy spectrum of accelerated protons at accretion shocks of galaxy clusters and of the characteristics of their broad band emission. The proton energy distribution is calculated self-consistently via a time-dependent numerical treatment of the shock acceleration process which takes into account the proton energy losses due to interactions with the CMBR. We calculate the energy distribution of accelerated protons, as well as the flux of broad-band emission produced by secondary electrons and positrons via synchrotron and inverse Compton scattering processes. We find that the downstream and upstream regions contribute almost at the same level to the emission. For the typical parameters characterising galaxy clusters, the synchrotron and IC peaks in the spectral energy distributions appear at comparable flux levels. For an efficient acceleration, the expected emission components in the X-ray and gamma-ray band are close to the detection threshold of current generation instruments, and will be possibly detected with the future generation of detectors.