A spatially resolved SSC Shock-in-Jet model

In this paper a spatially resolved, fully self-consistent SSC model is presented. The observable spectral energy distribution (SED) evolves entirely from a low energetic delta distribution of injected electrons by means of the implemented microphysics of the jet. These are in particular the properties of the shock and the ambient plasma, which can be varied along the jet axis. Hence a large variety of scenarios can be computed, e.g. the acceleration of particles via multiple shocks. Two acceleration processes, shock acceleration and stochastic acceleration, are taken into account. From the resulting electron distribution the SED is calculated taking into account synchrotron radiation, inverse Compton scattering (full cross section) and synchrotron self absorption. The model can explain SEDs where cooling processes are crucial. It can verify high variability results from acausal simulations and produce variability not only via injection of particles, but due to the presence of multiple shocks. Furthermore a fit of the data, obtained in the 2010 multi-frequency campaign of Mrk501, is presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; appeared in the proceedings of the conference: "High Energy Phenomena in Relativistic Outflows (HEPRO) III", held in Barcelona, Spain, June 27th-July 1st 2011 (IJMPCS

The radio morphology of a spatially resolved SSC model

One of the main, unresolved questions about the nature of quasars is the position of the acceleration site responsible for the highest energies. The attempt to investigate this question in the energy regime with the highest resolution, the radio band, has the downside that no theoretical model exists that can connect these two regimes. The model in this work tries to shrink this gap by extending the general synchrotron self Compton (SSC) model up to length scales in the order of the resolution of radio observations. The resulting spectral energy distributions (SED) show a qualitative improvement in the representation of the radio spectrum. Furthermore the obtained emission morphology shows similar properties to the radio structures observed in jets of quasars. A complete and quantitative connection will however need either much higher numerical effort or an improved methodology

Multi-band implications of external-IC flares

Very fast variability on scales of minutes is regularly observed in Blazars. The assumption that these flares are emerging from the dominant emission zone of the very high energy (VHE) radiation within the jet challenges current acceleration and radiation models. In this work we use a spatially resolved and time dependent synchrotron-self-Compton (SSC) model that includes the full time dependence of Fermi-I acceleration. We use the (apparent) orphan $\gamma$-ray flare of \textit{Mrk501} during MJD 54952 and test various flare scenarios against the observed data. We find that a rapidly variable external radiation field can reproduce the high energy lightcurve best. However, the effect of the strong inverse Compton (IC) cooling on other bands and the X-ray observations are constraining the parameters to rather extreme ranges. Then again other scenarios would require parameters even more extreme or stronger physical constraints on the rise and decay of the source of the variability which might be in contradiction with constraints derived from the size of the black hole's ergosphere.Comment: accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Afterlive: A performant code for Vlasov-Hybrid simulations

A parallelized implementation of the Vlasov-Hybrid method [Nunn, 1993] is presented. This method is a hybrid between a gridded Eulerian description and Lagrangian meta-particles. Unlike the Particle-in-Cell method [Dawson, 1983] which simply adds up the contribution of meta-particles, this method does a reconstruction of the distribution function $f$ in every time step for each species. This interpolation method combines meta-particles with different weights in such a way that particles with large weight do not drown out particles that represent small contributions to the phase space density. These core properties allow the use of a much larger range of macro factors and can thus represent a much larger dynamic range in phase space density. The reconstructed phase space density $f$ is used to calculate momenta of the distribution function such as the charge density $\rho$. The charge density $\rho$ is also used as input into a spectral solver that calculates the self-consistent electrostatic field which is used to update the particles for the next time-step. Afterlive (A Fourier-based Tool in the Electrostatic limit for the Rapid Low-noise Integration of the Vlasov Equation) is fully parallelized using MPI and writes output using parallel HDF5. The input to the simulation is read from a JSON description that sets the initial particle distributions as well as domain size and discretization constraints. The implementation presented here is intentionally limited to one spatial dimension and resolves one or three dimensions in velocity space. Additional spatial dimensions can be added in a straight forward way, but make runs computationally even more costly.Comment: Accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communication

Modelling the steady state spectral energy distribution of the BL-Lac Object PKS 2155-304 using a selfconsistent SSC model

In this paper we present a fully selfconsistent SSC model with particle acceleration due to shock and stochastic acceleration (Fermi-I and Fermi-II-Processes respectively) to model the quiescent spectral energy distribution (SED) observed from PKS 2155. The simultaneous August/September 2008 multiwavelength data of H.E.S.S., Fermi, RXTE, SWIFT and ATOM give new constraints to the high-energy peak in the SED concerning its curvature. We find that, in our model, a monoenergetic injection of electrons at $\gamma_0 = 910$ into the model region, which are accelerated by Fermi-I- and Fermi-II-processes while suffering synchrotron and inverse Compton losses, finally leads to the observed SED of PKS 2155-30.4 shown in H.E.S.S. and Fermi-LAT collaborations (2009). In contrast to other SSC models our parameters arise from the jet's microphysics and the spectrum is evolving selfconsistently from diffusion and acceleration. The $\gamma_0$-factor can be interpreted as two counterstreaming plasmas due to the motion of the blob at a bulk factor of $\Gamma = 58$ and opposed moving upstream electrons at moderate Lorentz factors with an average of $\gamma_u \approx 8$.Comment: 4 figure