English

Efficiency of cosmic ray reflections from an ultrarelativistic shock wave

Astrophysics 2016-08-30 v1

Abstract

The process of cosmic ray acceleration up to energies in excess of 102010^{20} eV at relativistic shock waves with large Lorentz factors, Γ1\Gamma \gg 1 requires Γ2\sim \Gamma^2 particle energy gains at single reflections from the shock (cf. Gallant & Achterberg 1999). In the present comment, applying numerical simulations we address an efficiency problem arising for such models. The actual efficiency of the acceleration process is expected to be substantially lower than the estimates of previous authors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9909430,
  title  = {Efficiency of cosmic ray reflections from an ultrarelativistic shock wave},
  author = {J. Bednarz and M. Ostrowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9909430},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

3 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS (Letters)