Kinetics of Particles in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks
Abstract
Charged plasma particles form an anisotropic counter-streaming distribution at the front of a shock. In the near- and ultra-relativistic regimes, Weibel (or two-stream) instability produces near-equipartition, chaotic, small-scale magnetic fields. The fields introduce effective collisions and "thermalize" the plasma particles via pitch-angle scattering. The properties of jitter radiation emitted by accelerated electrons from these small-scale fields are markedly different from synchrotron spectra. Here we theoretical summary and the results of recent numerical 3D PIC plasma kinetic simulations. The relation of the obtained results to the theory of gamma-ray bursts is outlined.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0310390,
title = {Kinetics of Particles in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks},
author = {Mikhail V. Medvedev and Luis O. Silva and Ricardo A. Fonseca and J. W. Tonge and Warren B. Mori},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0310390},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
To be published in proceedings of the conference "Astrophysical particle acceleration in geospace and beyond", Chattanooga, 2002. (11 pages, 6 figures, AGU style)