UC Irvine

Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are the most energetic particles known to exist, reaching energies as high as 1020 eV – a firm cutoff due to the GZK limit. It is believed that many of these particles originate in the jets of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Plasma wakefields propagating along AGN jets, driven by extremely intense electromagnetic pulses (whose Lorentz invariant vector potential may range from 106 – 1010) are argued to be a likely mechanism capable of generating ultra-high energy (UHE) charged particles, in addition to UHE neutrinos and gamma-rays as a result of collisions, among other emission types. A wakefield acceleration (WFA) model is developed in an effort to shed light on the origin of the these signals. It is posited that wakefield acceleration in conjunction with the magneto-rotational instability of the accretion disk explains both structural properties of the jets and details in their emission signals, such as correlations in neutrino and gamma-ray bursts, and in the case of blazars, anti-correlations in flux and spectral index. Furthermore, the model presented herein predicts an upper bound for the energy of UHECRs emitted from a source given the mass of its central compact object and total jet luminosity. Six case studies from a comprehensive mass range (1 − 109 M⊙) of astrophysical objects, each of which possess jets, emit high-energy gamma radiation and in some instances spatially identifiable UHECRs. All sources are strong candidates for UHECR emission, if not already known to emit them. To provide context for our model predictions we quantitatively compare them with observational data. Since the accretion and acceleration mechanisms are independent of mass, aside from determining maximum values, blazars (∼ 109 M⊙), radio galaxies (∼ 108 M⊙), Seyfert galaxies (∼ 106 M⊙), starburst galaxies (∼ 103 M⊙), even microquasars (1 ∼ 10 M⊙) interestingly exhibit the same physics.