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Relativistic Particle Transport in Hot Accretion Disks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Peter A. Becker ,
Menas Kafatos  and
Michael Maisack
Peter A. Becker
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Institute for Computational Sciences and Informatics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Menas Kafatos
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Institute for Computational Sciences and Informatics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Michael Maisack
Affiliation:
Astronomical Institute, University of Tuebingen, Germany

Abstract

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Accretion disks around rapidly rotating black holes provide one of the few plausible models for the production of intense radiation in AGNs above energies of several hundred MeV. The rapid rotation of the hole increases the binding energy per nucleon in the last stable orbit relative to the Schwarzschild case, and naturally leads to ion temperatures in the range 1012 -1013 K for sub-Eddington accretion rates. The protons in the hot inner region of a steady, two-temperature disk form a reservoir of energy that is sufficient to power the observed EGRET outbursts if the black hole mass is 1010M⊙ . Moreover, the accretion timescale for the inner region is comparable to the observed transient timescale of ~1 week. Hence EGRET outbursts may be driven by instabilities in hot, two-temperature disks around supermassive black holes. In this paper we discuss turbulent (stochastic) acceleration in hot disks as a possible source of GeV particles and radiation. We constrain the model by assuming the turbulence is powered by a collective instability that drains energy from the hot protons. We also provide some ideas concerning new, high-energy Penrose processes that produce GeV emission be directly tapping the rotational energy of Kerr black holes.

Subject headings: acceleration of particles — accretion, accretion disks — galaxies: nuclei — quasars: individual (3C 279) — radiation mechanisms: nonthermal

Type
Active Galaxies and Quasi-Stellar Objects
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 142: Particle Acceleration Phenomena in Astrophysical Plasmas , 1994 , pp. 949 - 953
Copyright
Copyright © The American Astronomical Society 1994

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