Abstract
Non-thermal emission from relativistic Cosmic Ray (CR) electrons gives
insight into the strength and morphology of intra-cluster magnetic fields, as
well as providing powerful tracers of structure formation shocks. Emission
caused by CR protons on the other hand still challenges current observations
and is therefore testing models of proton acceleration at intra-cluster shocks.
Large-scale simulations including the effects of CRs have been difficult to
achieve and have been mainly reduced to simulating an overall energy budget, or
tracing CR populations in post-processing of simulation output and has often
been done for either protons or electrons. We introduce CRESCENDO: Cosmic Ray
Evolution with SpeCtral Electrons aND prOtons, an efficient on-the-fly
Fokker-Planck solver to evolve distributions of CR protons and electrons within
every resolution element of our simulation. The solver accounts for CR
(re-)acceleration at intra-cluster shocks, based on results of recent PIC
simulations, adiabatic changes and radiative losses of electrons. We show its
performance in test cases as well as idealized galaxy cluster (GC) simulations.
We apply the model to an idealized GC merger following best-fit parameters for
CIZA J2242.4+5301-1 and study CR injection, radio relic morphology, spectral
steepening and synchrotron emission.
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