High-energy hadronic acceleration in extragalactic radio jets

Within an electric circuit description of extragalactic jets temporal variations of the electric currents are associated with finite collisionless conductivities and consequently magnetic-field-aligned electric fields E∥. The maximum field strengths depend on the efficiency of the jet MHD generator E⊥ and the local conversion to the E∥ component. The hadronic jet constituents can efficiently be accelerated in such fields all along the jets. To estimate the maximum energy the accelerated jet hadrons can achieve we consider energy loss processes as photon–pion and pair production as well as synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation. It turns out that for the strongest E∥ possible the Centaurus A jet is a most promising candidate for the source of the highest energy component of cosmic rays.