English

A Relativistic Electron-Positron Outflow from a Tepid Fireball

Astrophysics 2008-12-12 v1

Abstract

Through detailed numerical simulations, we demonstrate that relativistic outflows (Lorentz factor Γ7\Gamma \sim 7) of electron-positron pairs can be produced by radiative acceleration even when the flow starts from a nearly pair equilibrium state at subrelativistic temperatures. Contrary to the expectation that pairs annihilate during an expansion stage for such low temperatures, we find that most pairs can survive for the situations obtained in our previous work. This is because in the outflow-generating region the dynamical timescale is short enough even though the fireball is optically thick to scattering. Several problems that should be solved to apply to actual active galactic nucleus jets are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.2102,
  title  = {A Relativistic Electron-Positron Outflow from a Tepid Fireball},
  author = {Katsuaki Asano and Fumio Takahara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.2102},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures, ApJL 690, L81

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:50:44.444Z