Acceleration of cosmic rays in presence of magnetohydrodynamic fluctuations at small scales

TL;DR

This paper studies how small-scale magnetohydrodynamic turbulence accelerates cosmic rays, revealing universal diffusion behaviors and demonstrating its significant impact on high-energy protons, which influences cosmic ray energy retention.

Contribution

It introduces a universal scaling law for momentum diffusion coefficients in small-scale turbulence and numerically explores their effects on cosmic ray acceleration.

Findings

Diffusion coefficients scale as D_γγ ∝ γ^(-2/3) and D_μμ ∝ γ^(-8/3).

Small-scale turbulence significantly enhances high-energy proton acceleration.

Universality in momentum diffusion coefficients across different turbulence properties.

Abstract

This work investigates the evolution of the distribution of charged particles due to the mechanism of stochastic turbulent acceleration (STA) in presence of small-scale turbulence with a mean magnetic field. STA is usually modelled as a biased random walk process in the momentum space of the non-thermal particles. This results in an advection-diffusion type transport equation for the non-thermal particle distribution function. Under quasilinear approximation, and by assuming turbulent spectra with power being available only in the sub-gyroscale range, we find that the Fokker-Planck diffusion coefficients $D_{\gamma\gamma}$ and $D_{\mu\mu}$ scale with the Lorentz factor $\gamma$ as: $D_{\gamma\gamma}\propto\gamma^{-2/3}$ and $D_{\mu\mu}\propto\gamma^{-8/3}$. We consider Alfv\`{e}n and fast waves in our calculations, and find a universal trend for the momentum diffusion coefficient irrespective of the properties of the small-scale turbulence. Such universality has already been reported regarding the spatial diffusion of the cosmic rays, and, here too, we observe a universality in the momentum diffusion coefficient. Furthermore, with the calculated transport coefficients, we numerically solve the advection-diffusion type transport equation for the non-thermal particles. We demonstrate the interplay of various mircophysical processes such as STA, synchrotron loss and particle escape on the particle distribution by systematically varying the parameters of the problem. We observe that the effect of the small-scale turbulence is more impactful for the high energy protons as compared to the electrons and such turbulence is capable of sustaining the energy of the protons from catastrophic radiative loss processes. Such a finding is novel and helps us to enhance our understanding about the hadronic emission processes that are typically considered as a competitor for the leptonic emission.