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

Abstract

This work investigates the evolution of the distribution of charged particles (cosmic rays) 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 quasi-linear approximation, and by assuming turbulent spectra with power being available only in the sub-gyroscale range, we find that the Fokker-Planck diffusion coefficients Dγγ and Dμμ scale with the Lorentz factor γas Dγγ γ-2/3 and Dμμ γ-8/3. We consider Alfvèn 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 for certain astrophysical systems. © 2023 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.