No Arabic abstract
We consider the fundamental problem of charged particles moving along and around a curved magnetic field line, revising the synchro-curvature radiation formulae introduced by Cheng and Zhang (1996). We provide more compact expressions to evaluate the spectrum emitted by a single particle, identifying the key parameter that controls the transition between the curvature-dominated and the synchrotron-dominated regime. This parameter depends on the local radius of curvature of the magnetic field line, the gyration radius, and the pitch angle. We numerically solve the equations of motion for the emitting particle by considering self-consistently the radiative losses, and provide the radiated spectrum produced by a particle when an electric acceleration is balanced by its radiative losses, as it is assumed to happen in the outer gaps of pulsars magnetospheres. We compute the average spectrum radiated throughout the particle trajectory finding that the slope of the spectrum before the peak depends on the location and size of the emission region. We show how this effect could then lead to a variety of synchro-curvature spectra. Our results reinforce the idea that the purely synchrotron or curvature losses are, in general, inadequate to describe the radiative reaction on the particle motion, and the spectrum of emitted photons. Finally, we discuss the applicability of these calculations to different astrophysical scenarios.
To efficiently detect energetic light charged particles, it is common to use arrays of energy-loss telescopes involving two or more layers of detection media. As the energy of the particles increases, thicker layers are usually needed. However, carrying out measurements with thick-telescopes may require corrections for the losses due to nuclear reactions induced by the incident particles on nuclei within the detector and for the scattering of incident particles out of the detector, without depositing their full energy in the active material. In this paper, we develop a method for measuring such corrections and determine the reaction and out-scattering losses for data measured with the silicon-CsI(Tl) telescopes of the newly developed HiRA10 array. The extracted efficiencies are in good agreement with model predictions using the GEANT4 reaction loss algorithm for Z=1 and Z=2 isotopes. After correcting for the HiRA10 geometry, a general function that describes the efficiencies from the reaction loss in CsI(Tl) crystals as a function of range is obtained.
Droplets of absolutely stable strange quark matter (strangelets) immersed in a lepton background may be the energetically preferred composition of strange star crusts and of the interior of a new class of stars known as strangelet dwarfs. In this work we calculate the surface tension $sigma$ and the curvature coefficient $gamma$ of charged strangelets as a function of the baryon number density, the temperature, the chemical potential of trapped neutrinos, the strangelet size, the electric potential and the electric charge at their boundary. Strange quark matter in chemical equilibrium and with global electric charge neutrality is described within the MIT bag model. We focus on three different astrophysical scenarios, namely cold strange stars, proto strange stars and post merger strange stars. Finite size effects are implemented within the multiple reflection expansion framework. We find that $sigma$ decreases significantly as the strangelets boundary becomes more positively charged. This occurs because $sigma$ is dominated by the contribution of $s$ quarks which are the most massive particles in the system. Negatively charged $s$-quarks are suppressed in strangelets with a large positive electric charge, diminishing their contribution to $sigma$ and resulting in smaller values of the total $sigma$. We verify that the more extreme astrophysical scenarios, with higher temperatures and higher neutrino chemical potentials, allow higher positive values of the strangelets electric charge at the boundary and consequently smaller values of $sigma$. In contrast, $gamma$ is strongly dominated by the density of light ($u$ and $d$) quarks and is quite independent of the charge-per-baryon ratio, the temperature and neutrino trapping. We discuss the relative importance of surface and curvature effects as well as some astrophysical consequences of these results.
When treating the absorption of light, one focuses on the absorption coefficient, related to the probability of photons to survive while traversing a layer of material. From the point of view of particles doing the absorption, however, the elementary interaction of the particle with the photon is best described by the corresponding cross section. We revisit curvature radiation in order to find the absorption cross section for this process, making use of the Einstein coefficients and their relations with spontaneous and stimulated emission and true absorption. We derive the cross section as a function of the emission angle psi (i.e. the angle between the instantaneous velocity vector and the direction of the photon), and the cross section integrated over angles. Both are positive, contrary to the synchrotron case for which the cross section can be negative for large psi. Therefore, it is impossible to have curvature radiation masers. This has important consequences on sources of very large brightness temperatures that require a coherent emission process, such as pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts.
Fast radio bursts are extragalactic radio transient events lasting a few milliseconds with a ~Jy flux at ~1 GHz. We propose that these properties suggest a neutron star progenitor, and focus on coherent curvature radiation as the radiation mechanism. We study for which sets of parameters the emission can fulfil the observational constraints. Even if the emission is coherent, we find that self-absorption can limit the produced luminosities at low radio frequencies and that an efficient re-acceleration process is needed to balance the dramatic energy losses of the emitting particles. Self-absorption limits the luminosities at low radio frequency, while coherence favours steep optically thin spectra. Furthermore, the magnetic geometry must have a high degree of order to obtain coherent curvature emission. Particles emit photons along their velocity vectors, thereby greatly reducing the inverse Compton mechanism. In this case we predict that fast radio bursts emit most of their luminosities in the radio band and have no strong counterpart in any other frequency bands.
In this report we discuss appropriate strategies for the tracking of charged particles in the limit of zero curvature. The suggested approach avoids special treatments and precision issues that frequently arise in that limit. We provide explicit expressions for transport, refitting and vertexing in regions where magnetic field inhomogeneities or detector interaction effects can be approximately ignored.