Weibel Instability Driven by Relativistic Pair Jets: Particle Acceleration, Magnetic Field Generation, and Emission
Abstract
Shock acceleration is a ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysical plasmas. Plasma waves and their associated instabilities (e.g., Buneman, Weibel and other two-stream instabilities) created in collisionless shocks are responsible for particle (electron, positron, and ion) acceleration. Using a 3-D relativistic electromagnetic particle (REMP) code, we have investigated particle acceleration associated with a relativistic jet front propagating into an ambient plasma. We find that the growth times of the Weibel instability in electron-positron jets are not affected by the (electron-positron or electron-ion) ambient plasmas. However, the amplitudes of generated local magnetic fields in the electron-ion ambient plasma are significantly larger than those in the electron-positron ambient plasma.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0503515,
title = {Weibel Instability Driven by Relativistic Pair Jets: Particle Acceleration, Magnetic Field Generation, and Emission},
author = {K. -I. Nishikawa and P. Hardee and C. B. Hededal and G. Richardson and H. Sol and R. Preece and G. J. Fishman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0503515},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Proceeding of the 22nd Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, Dcember 13-17, 2004, Stanford University