Particle acceleration in the vacuum gaps in black hole magnetospheres

Understand

We consider particle acceleration in vacuum gaps in magnetospheres of black holes powered through Blandford-Znajek mechanism and embedded into radiatively-inefficient accretion flow (RIAF) environment.

• In such situation the gap height is limited by the onset of gamma-gamma pair production on the infrared photons originating from the RIAF.
• We numerically calculate acceleration and propagation of charged particles taking into account the detailed structure of electric and magnetic field in the gap and in the entire black hole magnetosphere, radiative energy losses and interactions of gamma rays produced by the propagated charged particles with the background radiation field of RIAF.
• We show that the presence of the vacuum gap has clear observational signatures.