Stochastic Electron Acceleration in SNR RX J1713.7-3946

Abstract

Stochastic acceleration of charged particles due to their interactions with plasma waves may be responsible for producing superthermal particles in a variety of astrophysical systems. This process can be described as a diffusion process in the energy space with the Fokker-Planck equation. In this paper, a time-dependent numerical code is used to solve the reduced Fokker-Planck equation involving only time and energy variables with general forms of the diffusion coefficients. We also propose a self-similar model for particle acceleration in Sedov explosions and use the TeV SNR RX J1713.7-3946 as an example to demonstrate the model characteristics. Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is utilized to constrain model parameters with observations.