ENERGY PARTITION BETWEEN ENERGETIC ELECTRONS AND TURBULENT MAGNETIC FIELD IN SUPERNOVA REMNANT RX J1713.7-3946

Current observations of supernova remnant (SNR) RX J1713.7-3946 favor the leptonic scenario for the TeV emission, where the radio to X-ray emission is produced via the synchrotron process and the gamma-ray emission is produced via the inverse Comptonization of soft background photons, and the electron distribution can be inferred from the observed gamma-ray spectrum with a spectral inversion method. It is shown that the observed correlation between the X-ray and gamma-ray brightness of SNR RX J1713.7-3946 can be readily explained with the assumption that the energy density of energetic electrons is proportional to that of the magnetic field in such a scenario. A two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation is then carried out to model the overall emission spectrum. It is found that the total energy of electrons above similar to 1 GeV is equal to that of the magnetic field. This is the first piece of observational evidence for energy equipartition between energetic electrons and magnetic field in the downstream of strong collisionless astrophysical shocks of SNRs.