Application of random walk theory to the first order Fermi acceleration in shock waves

Abstract

We formulate the first order Fermi acceleration in parallel shock waves in terms of the random walk theory. The formulation is applicable to any value of the shock speed and the particle speed, in particular to the acceleration in relativistic shocks, as long as large angle scattering is suitable for the scattering process of particles. We first show that the trajectory of a particle suffering from large angle scattering can be treated as a random walk in a moving medium with an absorbing boundary (e.g., the shock front). We derive an integral equation to determine the density of scattering points of the random walk, and by solving it approximately we obtain approximate solutions of the probability density of pitch angle at and the return probability after the shock crossing in analytical form. These approximate solutions include corrections of several non-diffusive effects to the conventional diffusion approximation and we show that they agree well with the Monte Carlo results for isotropic scattering model for any shock speed and particle speed. Finally, we give an analytical expression of the spectral index of accelerated particles in parallel shocks valid for arbitrary shock speed.

20 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (2)

• Particle acceleration at ultrarelativistic shocks: an eigenfunction method
• Galaxy Collisions

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