Adiabatic Non-resonant Acceleration in Magnetic Turbulence and Hard Spectra of Gamma-Ray Bursts

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Publication Title

Astrophysical Journal Letters

Volume

846

Issue

2

Abstract

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 ∼ 1, which naturally produces a low-energy photon index α ∼ -1 via the synchrotron radiation. For typical GRB parameters, the synchrotron emission can extend to a characteristic photon energy on the order of ∼100 keV. © 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Language

english

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