Strong accretion shocks are expected to illuminate the warm-hot inter-galactic medium encompassed by the filaments of the cosmic web, through synchrotron radio emission. Given their high sensitivity, low-frequency large radio facilities may already b
e able to detect signatures of this extended radio emission from the region in between two close and massive galaxy clusters. In this work we exploit the non-detection of such diffuse emission by deep observations of two pairs of relatively close ($simeq 10$ Mpc) and massive ($M_{500}geq 10^{14}M_odot$) galaxy clusters using the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR). By combining the results from the two putative inter-cluster filaments, we derive new independent constraints on the median strength of inter-galactic magnetic fields: $B_{rm 10 Mpc}< 2.5times 10^2,rm nG,(95%, rm CL)$. Based on cosmological simulations and assuming a primordial origin of the B-fields, these estimates can be used to limit the amplitude of primordial seed magnetic fields: $B_0leq10,rm nG$. We advise the observation of similar cluster pairs as a powerful tool to set tight constraints on the amplitude of extragalactic magnetic fields.
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.
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.
