A Relativistic Electron-Positron Outflow from a Tepid Fireball

Abstract

Through detailed numerical simulations, we demonstrate that relativistic outflows (Lorentz factor $\Gamma \sim 7$) of electron-positron pairs can be produced by radiative acceleration even when the flow starts from a nearly pair equilibrium state at subrelativistic temperatures. Contrary to the expectation that pairs annihilate during an expansion stage for such low temperatures, we find that most pairs can survive for the situations obtained in our previous work. This is because in the outflow-generating region the dynamical timescale is short enough even though the fireball is optically thick to scattering. Several problems that should be solved to apply to actual active galactic nucleus jets are discussed.

11 pages, 4 figures, ApJL 690, L81

References in corpus (6)

• General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Jet Formation and Large-Scale Propagation from Black Hole Accretion Systems
• Magnetically Driven Jets in the Kerr Metric
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• Generation of a Fireball in AGN Hot Plasmas
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