Abstract
We have already noted in many places throughout the book that the very dynamics of astrophysical plasma often results in production of an ultrarelativistic plasma component on top of nonrelativistic background plasma or drives the entire plasma to an ultrarelativistic state. A vivid example of the first option is the galactic and extragalactic (ultra-high-energy) cosmic rays (CRs), while the latter one includes ultrarelativistic pulsar winds or jets and shock waves in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and GRBs. Physics of such ultrarelativistic plasmas represents an extremely broad, highly dynamic, and rapidly developing field of the modern astrophysics, which is hardly possible to comprehensively describe within a textbook format. Nevertheless, below we attempt to present some basic ideas and selected results having in mind to (1) introduce current concepts related to the ultrarelativistic plasma components and (2) demonstrate that the general theoretical framework developed within the cosmic electrodynamics is fully applicable here as well as to traditional nonrelativistic cases.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The problem of MHD wave generation by relativistics particle is under active discussion in the astrophysics context since (Wentzel 1968). More recent analytical and numerical studies on the topics are done by Bell and Lucek (2001), Bell (2004), Bykov and Toptygin (2007), Zirakashvili et al. (2008) and Bykov et al. (2011) etc.
- 3.
If the shock wave propagates through warm ISM gas containing neutrals, they become ionized at the shock so the total proton number must be used in estimating the Alfvén speed.
- 4.
Note that quasilinear solution for the particle and resonant self-generated turbulence distributions (Lee 1983; Lagage and Cesarsky 1983; Fedorenko and Fleishman 1988) contains a similar spatial dependence, ∼ | z |  − 1, for particles with a given energy, while here it is only valid for the particle number density. The difference originates because the quasilinear models consider saturated state of the resonant streaming instability, while here a preexisting turbulence level is postulated and further wave generation on top of it studied.
- 5.
A pulsar wind with that relativistic factor is required to ensure the observed high efficiency, \(\sim 10\mbox{ \textendash }20\)%, of the pulsar spin-down luminosity into the PWN luminosity (Kennel and Coroniti 1984b).
- 6.
This estimate assumes a highly collimated explosion with a jet occupying only 10 − 3 of the full solid angle; isotropic explosion would require a release of ∼ 1054 erg, which looks unrealistic for a star explosion.
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Fleishman, G.D., Toptygin, I.N. (2013). Ultrarelativistic Component of Astrophysical Plasmas. In: Cosmic Electrodynamics. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 388. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5782-4_12
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