On the Origin of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

Turbulence-driven plasma accelerators produced by magnetized accretion disks around black holes are proposed as the mechanism mainly responsible for observed cosmic ray protons with ultra high energies 10{sup 19}-10{sup 21} eV. The magnetized disk produces a voltage comparable to these cosmic ray energies. Here we present a Poynting model in which this voltage provides all of the energy to create the jet-like structures observed to be ejected from accretion disks, and this voltage also accelerates ions to high energies at the top of the expanding structure. Since the inductive electric field E = -v x B driving expansion has no component parallel to the magnetic field B, ion acceleration requires plasma wave generation - either a coherent wave accelerator as recently proposed, or instability-driven turbulence. We find that turbulence can tap the full inductive voltage as a quasi-steady accelerator, and even higher energies are produced by transient events on this structure. We find that both MHD modes due to the current and ion diffusion due to kinetic instability caused by the non-Maxwellian ion distribution contribute to acceleration. We apply our results to extragalactic giant radiolobes, whose synchrotron emissions serve to calibrate the model, and we discuss extrapolating to other astrophysicalmore » structures. Approximate calculations of the cosmic ray intensity and energy spectrum are in rough agreement with data and serve to motivate more extensive MHD and kinetic simulations of turbulence that could provide more accurate cosmic ray and synchrotron spectra to be compared with observations. A distinctive difference from previous models is that the cosmic ray and synchrotron emissions arise from different parts of the magnetic structure, thus providing a signature for the model.« less