Papers › Thermal Electrons in Mildly-relativistic Synchrotron Blast-waves
Thermal Electrons in Mildly-relativistic Synchrotron Blast-waves
Ben Margalit, Eliot Quataert
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Numerical models of collisionless shocks robustly predict an electron distribution comprised of both thermal and non-thermal electrons. Here, we explore in detail the effect of thermal electrons on the emergent synchrotron emission from sub-relativistic shocks. We present a complete `thermal + non-thermal' synchrotron model and derive properties of the resulting spectrum and light-curves. Using these results we delineate the relative importance of thermal and non-thermal electrons for sub-relativistic shock-powered synchrotron transients. We find that thermal electrons are naturally expected to contribute significantly to the peak emission if the shock velocity is ≳0.2c, but would be mostly undetectable in non-relativistic shocks. This helps explain the dichotomy between typical radio supernovae and the emerging class of `AT2018cow-like' events. The signpost of thermal electron synchrotron emission is a steep optically-thin spectral index and a ν² optically-thick spectrum. These spectral features are also predicted to correlate with a steep post-peak light-curve decline rate, broadly consistent with observed AT2018cow-like events. We expect that thermal electrons may be observable in other contexts where mildly-relativistic shocks are present, and briefly estimate this effect for gamma-ray burst afterglows and binary neutron star mergers. Our model can be used to fit spectra and light-curves of events and accounts for both thermal and non-thermal electron populations with no additional physical degrees of freedom.
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