Simulations of neutrino and gamma-ray production from relativistic black-hole microquasar jets

TL;DR

This paper models electromagnetic and particle emissions from relativistic black-hole microquasar jets, focusing on hadronic processes, particle acceleration, and resulting gamma-ray and neutrino production, with applications to specific galactic and extragalactic systems.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed relativistic MHD model for hadronic jet emissions, incorporating particle acceleration and secondary particle production, applied to multiple microquasar systems.

Findings

Secondary particle distributions are characterized within hadronic jets.

Model successfully applied to Galactic and extragalactic microquasars.

Predicted gamma-ray and neutrino fluxes for observed systems.

Abstract

Recently, microquasar jets have aroused the interest of many researchers focusing on the astrophysical plasma outflows and various jet ejections. In this work, we concentrate on the investigation of electromagnetic radiation and particle emissions from the jets of stellar black hole binary systems characterized by their hadronic content in their jets. Such emissions are reliably described within the context of the relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics. Our model calculations are based on the Fermi acceleration mechanism through which the primary particles (mainly protons) of the jet are accelerated. As a result, a small portion of thermal protons of the jet acquire relativistic energies, through shock-waves generated into the jet plasma. From the inelastic collisions of fast (non-thermal) protons with the thermal (cold) ones, secondary charged and neutral particles (pions, kaons, muons, $\eta$-particles, etc.) are created as well as electromagnetic radiation from the radio wavelength band, to X-rays and even to very high energy $\gamma$-ray emission. One of our main goals is, through the appropriate solution of the transport equation and taking into account the various mechanisms that cause energy losses to the particles, to study the secondary particle distributions within hadronic astrophysical jets. After testing our method on the Galactic MQs SS 433 and Cyg X-1, as a concrete extragalactic binary system, we examine the LMC X-1 located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is worth mentioning that, for the companion O star (and its extended nebula structure) of the LMC X-1 system, new observations using spectroscopic data from VLT/UVES have been published few years ago.