Electron Pre-acceleration in Weak Quasi-perpendicular Shocks in Clusters of Galaxies

Giant radio relics in the outskirts of galaxy clusters have been observed and they are interpreted as synchrotron emission from relativistic electrons accelerated via diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) in weak shocks of Ms < 3.0. In the DSA theory, the particle momentum should be greater than a few times the momentum of thermal protons to cross the shock transition and participate in the Fermi acceleration process. In the equilibrium, the momentum of thermal electrons is much smaller than the momentum of thermal protons, so electrons need to be pre-accelerated before they can go through DSA. To investigate such electron injection process, we study the electron pre-acceleration in weak quasi-perpendicular shocks (Ms = 2.0 - 3.0) in an ICM plasma (kT = 8.6 keV, beta = 100) through 2D particle-in-cell simulations. It is known that in quasi-perpendicular shocks, a substantial fraction of electrons could be reflected upstream, gain energy via shock drift acceleration (SDA), and generate oblique waves via the electron firehose instability (EFI), leading the energization of electrons through wave-particle interactions. We find that such kinetic processes are effective only in supercritical shocks above a critical Mach number, $Ms{\ast}{\sim}2.3$. In addition, even in shocks with Ms > 2.3, energized electrons may not reach high energies to be injected to DSA, because the oblique EFI alone fails to generate long-wavelength waves. Our results should have implications for the origin and nature of radio relics.