Related papers: Particle acceleration at reconnecting separator cu…
Magnetic reconnection in relativistic collisionless plasmas can accelerate particles and power high-energy emission in various astrophysical systems. Whereas most previous studies focused on relativistic reconnection in pair plasmas, less…
Recent developments in the design of magnetic confinement fusion devices have allowed the construction of exceptionally optimized stellarator configurations. The near-axis expansion in particular has proven to enable the construction of…
Shock accelerated electrons are found in many astrophysical environments, and the mechanisms by which they are accelerated to high energies are still not completely clear. For relatively high Mach numbers, the shock is supercritical, and…
We study the phase behavior of polar Active Brownian Particles moving in two-spatial dimensions and interacting through volume exclusion and velocity alignment. We combine particle-based simulations of the microscopic model with a simple…
We model the diffusive shock acceleration of particles in a system of two colliding shock waves and present a method to solve the time-dependent problem analytically in the test-particle approximation and high energy limit. In particular,…
Magnetic reconnection drives multi-species particle acceleration broadly in space and astrophysics. We perform the first 3D hybrid simulations (fluid electrons, kinetic ions) that contain sufficient scale separation to produce nonthermal…
Magnetic reconnection occurring in collisionless environments is a multi-scale process involving both ion and electron kinetic processes. Because of their small mass, the electron scales are difficult to resolve in numerical and satellite…
We present large scale 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to examine particle energization in magnetic reconnection of relativistic electron-positron (pair) plasmas. The initial configuration is set up as a relativistic Harris…
Despite significant advances in particle imaging technologies over the past two decades, few advances have been made in particle tracking, i.e. linking individual particle positions across time series data. The state-of-the-art tracking…
The recent detection of gravitational waves associated with a binary neutron star merger revives interest in interacting pulsar magnetospheres. Current models predict that a significant amount of magnetic energy should be released prior to…
Particle acceleration consequences from fluctuating electric fields superposed on an X-type magnetic field in collisionless solar plasma are studied. Such a system is chosen to mimic generic features of dynamic reconnection, or the…
Most active colloid experiments are quasi-2D. Here a 3D density-matched solution of active particles propelled and aligned with an AC electric field uniquely facilitates measurement of short and long-range particle-wall interactions.…
An explicitly energy-conserving full orbit code CUEBIT, developed originally to describe energetic particle effects in laboratory fusion experiments, has been applied to the problem of proton acceleration in solar flares. The model fields…
An algorithm is demonstrated that performs first-principles tracking of relativistic charged-particles. A covariant approach is used which relies on retarded vector potentials for trajectory integration instead of performing electromagnetic…
We address the issue of electromagnetic pulsar spindown by combining our experience from the two limiting idealized cases which have been studied in great extent in the past: that of an aligned rotator where ideal MHD conditions apply, and…
While a growing body of research indicates that relativistic magnetic reconnection is a prodigious source of particle acceleration in high-energy astrophysical systems, the dominant acceleration mechanism remains controversial. Using a…
It has been proposed that particles bouncing between magnetized flows converging in a reconnection region can be accelerated by the first order Fermi mechanism. Analytical considerations of this mechanism have shown that the spectral index…
Fast reconnection in magnetically dominated plasmas is widely invoked in models of dissipation in pulsar winds, gamma-ray flares in the Crab nebula, and to explain the radio nanoshots of pulsars. When current sheets evolve reaching a…
Trajectories and radiation of the accelerating electrons are studied in the pulsar magnetosphere approximated as the electromagnetic field of the Deutsch's solutions. Because the electrons are accelerated rapidly to ultra-relativistic…
A nonthermal particle acceleration mechanism involving the interaction of a charged particle with multiple magnetic islands is proposed. The original Fermi acceleration model, which assumes randomly distributed magnetic clouds moving at…