Self-Consistent Fokker-Planck Treatment Of Particle Distributions in Astrophysical Plasmas

Abstract

High-energy, multi-component plasmas in which pair creation and annihilation, lepton-lepton scattering, lepton-proton scattering, and Comptonization all contribute to establishing the particle and photon distributions, are present in a broad range of compact astrophysical objects. Earlier work has included much of the microphysics needed to account for electron-photon and electron-proton interactions, but little has been done to handle the redistribution of the particles as a result of their Coulomb interaction with themselves in an arbitrary case. Our goal here is to use a Fokker-Planck approach in order to develop a fully self-consistent theory for the interaction of arbitrarily distributed particles and radiation to arrive at an accurate representation of the high-energy plasma in these sources. We conduct several tests representative of two dominant segments of parameter space and discuss physical implications of the non-Maxwellian distribution function. Approximate analytical forms for the electron distribution in the case of strongly non-Maxwellian plasmas are given.