Electron Beam Induced Radio Emission from Ultracool Dwarfs

S. Yu, J.G. Doyle, A. Kuznetsov, G. Hallinan, A. Antonova, A.L. MacKinnon, A. Golden

Figure 1. The schematic diagram to present the simulation box for the radio emission from ultracool dwarfs. In an orthogonal reference system with spatial direction x, y and z, v_x, v_y and v_z represent the velocity components of particles, while E_x, E_y, E_z, B_x, B_y and B_z represent the electric and magnetic fields components.

Abstract

We present the numerical simulations for an electron-beam-driven and loss-cone-driven electron cyclotron maser (ECM) with different plasma parameters and different magnetic field strengths for a relatively small region and short time-scale in an attempt to interpret the recent discovered intense radio emission from ultracool dwarfs. We find that a large amount of electromagnetic field energy can be effectively released from the beam-driven ECM, which rapidly heats the surrounding plasma. A rapidly developed high-energy tail of electrons in velocity space (resulting from the heating process of the ECM) may produce the radio continuum depending on the initial strength of the external magnetic field and the electron beam current. Both significant linear polarization and circular polarization of electromagnetic waves can be obtained from the simulations. The spectral energy distributions of the simulated radio waves show that harmonics may appear from 10 to 70ν_pe (ν_pe is the electron plasma frequency) in the non-relativistic case and from 10 to 600ν_pe in the relativistic case, which makes it difficult to find the fundamental cyclotron frequency in the observed radio frequencies. A wide frequency band should therefore be covered by future radio observations.

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Last Revised: 2012 April 24th