Young supernovae as experimental sites for studying the electron acceleration mechanism

Abstract

Radio emissions from young supernovae (≲1 year after the explosion) show a peculiar feature in the relativistic electron population at a shock wave, where their energy distribution is steeper than typically found in supernova remnants and than that predicted from the standard diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) mechanism. This has been especially established for the case for a class of stripped envelope supernovae (SNe IIb/Ib/Ic), where a combination of high shock velocity and low circumstellar material density makes it easier to derive the intrinsic energy distribution than in other classes of SNe. We suggest that this apparent discrepancy reflects a situation where the low energy electrons, before being accelerated by the DSA-like mechanism, are responsible for the radio synchrotron emission from young SNe, and that studying young SNe sheds light on the still-unresolved electron injection problem in the acceleration theory of cosmic rays. We suggest that the electron's energy distribution could be flattened toward high energy, most likely around 100 MeV, which marks a transition from inefficient to efficient acceleration. Identifying this feature will be a major advance in understanding the electron acceleration mechanism. We suggest two further probes: (1) millimeter/submillimeter observations in the first year after the explosion and (2) X-ray observations at about one year and thereafter. We show that these are reachable by ALMA and Chandra for nearby SNe. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.