English

Diffusion of charged particles in a stochastic force-free magnetic field

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-12-03 v2

Abstract

We study diffusion of charged particles in stationary stochastic magnetic field B{\bf B} with zero mean, B=0\langle {\bf B} \rangle = 0 . In the case when electric current is carried by electrons, the field is force-free, curlB=αB\mathrm{curl} \,{\bf B} = \alpha{\bf B} , where α(r)\alpha({\bf r}) is an arbitrary scalar function. In a small region where the function α\alpha and the field magnitude B|{\bf B}| are approximately constant, the equations of motion of charged particles are integrated and reduced to the equation of mathematical pendulum. The transition from trapped to untrapped particles is continuously traced. Averaging over the magnetic field spectrum gives the spatial diffusion coefficient DD of particles as a function of the Larmor radius rLr_L in the large-scale magnetic fields (BLSB_{LS}) and magnetic field correlation length L0L_0. The diffusion coefficient turns out to be proportional to the Larmor radius, DrLD\propto r_L , for rL<L0/2πr_L <L_0 / 2\pi , and to the Larmor radius squared, DrL2 D \propto r_L^2 , for rL>L0/2π r_L> L_0 /2\pi . We apply obtained results to the diffusion of cosmic rays in the Galaxy, which contains a large number of independent regions with parameters L0L_0 and BLSB_{LS} varying in wide range. We average over BLSB_{LS} with the Kolmogorov spectrum and over L0L_0 with the distribution function f(L0)L01+σf(L_0)\propto L_0^{- 1+ \sigma}. For the practically flat spectrum σ=1/15\sigma = 1/15, we have Drm0.7 D\propto r_m^{0.7}, which is consistent with observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.02331,
  title  = {Diffusion of charged particles in a stochastic force-free magnetic field},
  author = {Ya. N. Istomin and A. M. Kiselev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.02331},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures