Plasma waves and cosmic rays

With energies exceeding 10²⁰ eV, the highest-energy cosmic-ray protons are as energetic as well-hit tennis balls. How does a proton become so energetic? Recent cosmic-ray data disfavor the notion that these ultra-energetic protons have exotic origins such as the decay of very massive particles as yet unidentified. So one must seek the proton acceleration mechanism in familiar astrophysical environments. The conventional suggestions—acceleration by relativistic shocks, spinning black holes, or flares on hypermagnetized neutron stars—each have problems accounting for the highest observed energies. Shock acceleration, for example, becomes increasingly inefficient at high energy because the inevitable trajectory bending causes severe synchrotron energy loss. Now theorist Pisin Chen (SLAC and National Taiwan University) and coworkers have demonstrated analytically and by computer simulation that so-called magnetowaves —electromagnetic waves with unusually strong magnetic components in magnetized plasmas—can drive plasma waves in their wake much as laser pulses in the laboratory drive plasma wakefields in experimental plasma-based accelerators (see Physics Today, March 2009, page 44). The mechanism avoids synchrotron loss, and it provides strong accelerating gradients even at very high energy. Chen and company show that a proton surfing a stochastic succession of such plasma wakes can, with luck, be accelerated to 10²¹ eV. Magnetowaves are believed to be produced in the relativistic jets emanating from active galactic nuclei. And the "luck" required for the proton to catch just the right sequence of plasma waves in an AGN jet accords with the observation that ultra-energetic cosmic rays are extremely rare. That's why the detector arrays that study them cover thousands of square kilometers. (F.-Y. Chang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., in press.) — Bertram Schwarzschild