Pair Creation at Shocks: Application to the High Energy Emission of Compact objects

Abstract

We investigate the effect of pair creation on a shock structure. Actually, particles accelerated by a shock can be sufficiently energetic to boost, via Inverse Compton (IC) process for example, surrounding soft photons above the rest mass electron energy and thus to trigger the pair creation process. The increase of the associated pair pressure is thus able to disrupt the plasma flow and possibly, for too high pressure, to smooth it completely. Reversely, significant changes of the flow velocity profile may modify the distribution function of the accelerated particles, modifying consequently the pair creation rate. Stationary states are then obtained by solving self-consistently for the particle distribution function and the flow velocity profile. We discuss our results and the application of these processes to the high energy emission and variability of compact objects.