ENERGY PARTITION BETWEEN ENERGETIC ELECTRONS AND TURBULENT MAGNETIC FIELD IN SUPERNOVA REMNANT RX J1713.7-3946

Abstract

Current observations of supernova remnant (SNR) RX J1713.7-3946 favor the\nleptonic scenario for the TeV emission, where the radio to X-ray emission is\nproduced via the synchrotron process and the $\\gamma$-ray emission is produced\nvia the inverse Comptonization of soft background photons, and the electron\ndistribution can be inferred from the observed $\\gamma$-ray spectrum with a\nspectral inversion method. It is shown that the observed correlation between\nthe X-ray and $\\gamma$-ray brightness of SNR RX J1713.7-3946 can be readily\nexplained with the assumption that the energy density of energetic electrons is\nproportional to that of the magnetic field in such a scenario. A 2D\nmagnetohydrodynamic simulation is then carried out to model the overall\nemission spectrum. It is found that the total energy of electrons above $\\sim\n1$ GeV is equal to that of the magnetic field. This is the first piece of\nobservational evidence for energy equipartition between energetic electrons and\nmagnetic field in the downstream of strong collision-less astrophysical shocks\nof SNRs.\n