Adiabatic non-resonant acceleration in magnetic turbulence and hard spectra of gamma-ray bursts [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08029


We introduce a non-resonant acceleration mechanism arising from the second adiabatic invariant in magnetic turbulence and apply it to study the prompt emission spectra of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The mechanism contains both the first- and second-order Fermi acceleration, originating from the interacting turbulent reconnection and dynamo processes. It leads to a hard electron energy distribution up to a cutoff energy at the balance between the acceleration and synchrotron cooling. The sufficient acceleration rate ensures a rapid hardening of any initial energy distribution to a power-law distribution with the index $p \sim 1$, which naturally produces a low-energy photon index $\alpha \sim -1$ via the synchrotron radiation. For typical GRB parameters, the synchrotron emission can extend to a characteristic photon energy on the order of $\sim 100$ keV.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Xu and B. Zhang
Tue, 29 Aug 17
11/65

Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in ApJL