• Accepted Paper

Exploring cosmic rays from gravity-limited acceleration at supermassive black holes

Elisa Resconi, Elena Manao, Paolo Padovani, Frank M. Rieger, and Gia Dvali

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 5 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8p34-jczv

Abstract

We show that horizon-scale magnetic fields around supermassive black holes (SMBHs), only limited by gravity, yield a universal, model-independent ceiling on electromagnetic energy density. For rotating SMBHs, this field enables particle acceleration up to ∼10^27 eV set solely by fundamental constants. We identify a parameter space in accretion rate and magnetic field strength in which quiescent nuclei simultaneously satisfy the transparency conditions for Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) escape and the field requirements for reaching Ultra-High Energies (UHE), naturally complementing photon-rich Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), which favor neutrino production but suppress UHECR escape. We observe that, when including curvature energy losses, the energy of the primaries scales weakly as E_curv ∝ M^1/4 and allows to achieve UHE across different compositions and SMBHs masses (106–1010M⊙), without requiring extreme spins or super-Eddington accretion. A cross-correlation of the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) public data with galaxies hosting reliably measured SMBH masses, separating AGN from quiescent hosts, reveals marginal local excesses (≲ 2.8σ) consistent with isotropy after correcting for the look-elsewhere effect. The framework provides a direct link between black-hole physics and the maximum energies of cosmic particles, and defines concrete observational tests for next-generation UHECR datasets.

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