Speaker
Description
The process of hierarchical structure formation drives powerful shocks through the merger of massive galaxy clusters and the continuous accretion of mass onto cosmic filaments and galaxy clusters. The role of these shocks in the acceleration of GeV to TeV protons and their distribution in the intra-cluster and warm-hot intergalactic medium (ICM and WHIM) is so far not well understood.
I will present our recent advances in self-consistently modeling the acceleration of particles, their advection, and their spectral evolution in cosmological simulations of galaxy cluster formation. We recently studied the impact of the recently introduced potential confinement of CR protons by micro-mirror instabilities in the ICM.
In this talk, I will present follow-up work that studies the volume-filling fraction of shock-accelerated TeV protons in the ICM and their potential observability via diffuse gamma-ray emission.
