Particle Diffusion and Acceleration in Magnetorotational Instability Turbulence

TL;DR

This study investigates how turbulence from magnetorotational instability in accretion disks accelerates particles, revealing diffusion behaviors and acceleration mechanisms that could explain high-energy cosmic rays near black holes.

Contribution

The paper provides detailed simulation-based analysis of particle diffusion and stochastic acceleration in MRI turbulence, highlighting the roles of gyro-radius and turbulence intermittency.

Findings

Particles with large gyro-radius exhibit super-Bohm diffusion coefficients.

Momentum diffusion scales linearly with particle momentum for certain particles.

Shear acceleration dominates for particles with gyro-radius exceeding 0.1H.

Abstract

Hot accretion flows contain collisionless plasmas that are believed to be capable of accelerating particles to very high energies, as a result of turbulence generated by the magnetorotational instability (MRI). We conduct unstratified shearing-box simulations of the MRI turbulence in ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), and inject energetic (relativistic) test particles in simulation snapshots to conduct a detailed investigation on particle diffusion and stochastic acceleration. We consider different amount of net vertical magnetic flux to achieve different disk magnetizations levels at saturated states, with sufficiently high resolution to resolve the gyro-radii ($R_g$) of most particles. Particles with large $R_g$ ($\gtrsim0.03$ disk scale height $H$) show spatial diffusion coefficients of $\sim30$ and $\sim5$ times Bohm values in the azimuthal and poloidal directions, respectively. We further measure particle momentum diffusion coefficient $D(p)$ by applying the Fokker-Planck equation to particle momentum evolution. For these particles, contribution from turbulent fluctuations scales as $D(p)\propto p$, and shear acceleration takes over when $R_g\gtrsim0.1H$, characterized by $D(p)\propto p^3$. For particles with smaller $R_g$ ($\lesssim0.03H$), their spatial diffusion coefficients roughly scale as $\sim p^{-1}$, and show evidence of $D(p)\propto p^2$ scaling in momentum diffusion but with large uncertainties. We find that multiple effects contribute to stochastic acceleration/deceleration, and the process is also likely affected by intermittency in the MRI turbulence. We also discuss the potential of accelerating PeV cosmic-rays in hot accretion flows around supermassive black holes.