Physics of Pair Producing Gaps in Black Hole Magnetospheres. II. General Relativity

This is the second paper in a series where we examine the physics of pair producing gaps in low-luminosity accreting supermassive black hole systems. In this paper, we carry out time-dependent self-consistent fully general relativistic 1D particle-in-cell simulations of the gap, including full inverse Compton scattering and photon tracking. Similar to the previous paper, we find a highly time-dependent solution where a macroscopic vacuum gap can open quasiperiodically, producing bursts of e(+/-) pairs and high energy radiation. We present the light curve, particle spectrum, and photon spectrum from this process. Using an empirical scaling relation, we rescale the parameters to the inferred values at the base of the jet in M87, and find that the observed TeV flares could potentially be explained by this model under certain parameter assumptions.