Electron beam induced radio emission from ultracool dwarfs

Abstract

We present the numerical simulations for an electron-beam-driven and loss-cone-driven electron-cyclotron maser (ECM) with different plasma parameters and different magnetic field strengths for a relatively small region and short time-scale in an attempt to interpret the recent discovered intense radio emission from ultracool dwarfs. We find that a large amount of electromagnetic field energy can be effectively released from the beam-driven ECM, which rapidly heats the surrounding plasma. A rapidly developed high-energy tail of electrons in velocity space (resulting from the heating process of the ECM) may produce the radio continuum depending on the initial strength of the external magnetic field and the electron beam current. Both significant linear polarization and circular polarization of electromagnetic waves can be obtained from the simulations. The spectral energy distributions of the simulated radio waves show that harmonics may appear from 10 to 70${\nu }_{\mathrm{pe}}$ (${\nu }_{\mathrm{pe}}$ is the electron plasma frequency) in the non-relativistic case and from 10 to 600${\nu }_{\mathrm{pe}}$ in the relativistic case, which makes it difficult to find the fundamental cyclotron frequency in the observed radio frequencies. A wide frequency band should therefore be covered by future radio observations.

10 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Origin of electron cyclotron maser-induced radio emissions at ultra-cool dwarfs: magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling currents
• Volume-limited radio survey of ultracool dwarfs
• The 5 GHz Arecibo Search for Radio Flares from Ultracool Dwarfs
• Ionization in Atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs and Extrasolar Planets V: Alfvén Ionization
• Cyclotron maser emission from power-law electrons with strong pitch-angle anisotropy
• Modelling the environment around five ultracool dwarfs via the radio domain
• Low-frequency GMRT observations of ultra-cool dwarfs
• Radio Emission from Ultra-Cool Dwarfs
• The effect of electron beam pitch angle and density gradient on solar type III radio bursts
• Electron cyclotron maser emission mode coupling to the z-mode on a longitudinal density gradient in the context of solar type III bursts
• Flash ionisation signature in coherent cyclotron emission from Brown Dwarfs