Electron and Ion Acceleration in Relativistic Shocks with Applications to GRB Afterglows

TL;DR

This paper models relativistic shock acceleration of particles in GRB afterglows using a Monte Carlo simulation that includes nonlinear effects, providing insights into particle spectra and emission processes.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible Monte Carlo framework for simulating particle acceleration and emission in relativistic shocks, incorporating nonlinear shock smoothing and ion-electron energy transfer.

Findings

Mass-to-charge enhancement observed in simulations.

Simulation predicts particle spectra and emission for various shock Lorentz factors.

Framework can be integrated with hydrodynamic models of GRB shocks.

Abstract

We have modeled the simultaneous first-order Fermi shock acceleration of protons, electrons, and helium nuclei by relativistic shocks. By parameterizing the particle diffusion, our steady-state Monte Carlo simulation allows us to follow particles from particle injection at nonthermal thermal energies to above PeV energies, including the nonlinear smoothing of the shock structure due to cosmic-ray (CR) backpressure. We observe the mass-to-charge (A/Z) enhancement effect believed to occur in efficient Fermi acceleration in non-relativistic shocks and we parameterize the transfer of ion energy to electrons seen in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. For a given set of environmental and model parameters, the Monte Carlo simulation determines the absolute normalization of the particle distributions and the resulting synchrotron, inverse-Compton, and pion-decay emission in a largely self-consistent manner. The simulation is flexible and can be readily used with a wide range of parameters typical of gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows. We describe some preliminary results for photon emission from shocks of different Lorentz factors and outline how the Monte Carlo simulation can be generalized and coupled to hydrodynamic simulations of GRB blast waves. We assume Bohm diffusion for simplicity but emphasize that the nonlinear effects we describe stem mainly from an extended shock precursor where higher energy particles diffuse further upstream. Quantitative differences will occur with different diffusion models, particularly for the maximum CR energy and photon emission, but these nonlinear effects should be qualitatively similar as long as the scattering mean free path is an increasing function of momentum.