Hadronic jet models today
arXiv:1011.0904 · doi:10.1017/S1743921310015644
Abstract
The matter content of relativistic jets in AGNs is dominated by a mixture of protons, electrons, and positrons. During dissipative events these particles tap a significant portion of the internal and/or kinetic energy of the jet and convert it into electromagnetic radiation. While leptons - even those with only mildly relativistic energies - can radiate efficiently, protons need to be accelerated up to energies exceeding eV to dissipate radiatively a significant amount of energy via either trigerring pair cascades or direct synchrotron emission. Here I review various constraints imposed on the role of hadronic non-adiabatic cooling processes in shaping the high energy spectra of blazars. It will be argued that protons, despite being efficiently accelerated and presumably playing a crucial role in jet dynamics and dissipation of the jet kinetic energy to the internal energy of electrons and positrons, are more likely to remain radiatively passive in AGN jets.
9 pages; in Proceedings of IAU Symposium 275, "Jets at all Scales", Buenos Aires, Argentina, 13-17 September 2010, eds. G.E. Romero, R.A. Sunyaev, and T. Belloni
References in corpus (11)
- Stability of Relativistic Jets from Rotating, Accreting Black Holes via Fully Three-Dimensional Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations
- Magnetic acceleration of relativistic AGN jets
- Constraining Emission Models of Luminous Blazar Sources
- A change in the optical polarization associated with a gamma-ray flare in the blazar 3C 279
- Chasing the heaviest black holes of jetted Active Galactic Nuclei
- Heating and Non-thermal Particle Acceleration in Relativistic, Transverse Magnetosonic Shock Waves in Proton-Electron-Positron Plasmas
- Transformation of the Poynting flux into the kinetic energy in relativistic jets
- Electron Shock Surfing Acceleration in Multidimensions: Two-dimensional Particle-In-Cell Simulation of Collisionless Perpendicular Shock
- Discovery of the low-energy cutoff in a powerful giant radio galaxy
- The 15--43-GHz Parsec-scale Circular Polarization of 41 Active Galactic Nuclei
- Effect of Plasma Composition on the Interpretation of Faraday Rotation