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Session 85 - Cataclysmic Variables and Accretion Disks.
Oral session, Wednesday, January 15
Harbour A,
A considerable amount of theoretical and computational evidence obtained in recent years strongly suggests the existence of tangled magnetic fields (arising from MHD turbulence) embedded in accretion disks around compact objects. In this paper, we will review recent work on a new kind of viscosity mechanism operating in hot, two temperature disks arising from collisions between ions and kinks in the tangled magnetic field (Subramanian, Becker, and Kafatos, Ap.J., 1996, vol. 469, p.784). We will also summarize ongoing work focusing on the shear-induced Fermi acceleration of relativistic protons in the same scenario, due to collisions with the magnetic scattering centers (kinks) embedded in the Keplerian flow. We will show that the heating due to the shear acceleration is equivalent to the traditional viscous heating as expected. The relativistic protons accelerated in the flow are postulated to feed a magnetically collimated jet, leading to the production of a strong gamma-ray flux when the jet collides with a distant cloud, possibly in the broad absorption line region roughly one parsec away from the central source.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: psubrama@gmu.edu
