Related papers: Large-Scale Parallel Electric Fields and Return Cu…
In an experiment on a magnetic dipole interacting with a laser-produced plasma the generation of an intense field aligned current (FAC) system was observed for the first time in a laboratory. The detailed measurements of the total value and…
Particle energization due to magnetic reconnection is an important unsolved problem for myriad space and astrophysical plasmas. Electron energization in magnetic reconnection has traditionally been examined from a particle, or Lagrangian,…
Magnetic reconnection is thought to be the driver for many explosive phenomena in the universe. The energy release and particle acceleration during reconnection have been proposed as a mechanism for producing high-energy emissions and…
Using fully kinetic simulations, we demonstrate that magnetic reconnection in relativistic plasmas is highly efficient at accelerating particles through a first-order Fermi process resulting from the curvature drift of particles in the…
Magnetic reconnection is a ubiquitous plasma phenomenon that plays a critical role in particle heating and energization. During reconnection, the topology of magnetic field rearranges, depositing energy into the surrounding plasma through…
Astrophysical plasmas have the remarkable ability to preserve magnetic topology, which inevitably gives rise to the accumulation of magnetic energy within stressed regions including current sheets. This stored energy is often released…
Astrophysical observations suggest that magnetic reconnection in relativistic plasmas plays an important role in the acceleration of energetic particles. Modeling this accurately requires numerical schemes capable of addressing large scales…
In this paper we present a novel approach to FEL simulations based on the decomposition of the electromagnetic field in a finite number of radiation modes. The evolution of each mode amplitude is simply determined by energy conservation.…
Electron-only reconnection is a process recently observed in the Earth's magnetosheath, where magnetic reconnection occurs at electron kinetic scales with only electrons involved. Electron-only reconnection is likely to have a significant…
In magnetized astrophysical outflows, the dissipation of field energy into particle energy via magnetic reconnection is often invoked to explain the observed non-thermal signatures. By means of two- and three-dimensional particle-in-cell…
X-ray emission shows the existence of multi-keV electrons in low-temperature, low-power, capacitively-coupled RF-heated magnetic-mirror plasmas that also contain a warm (300 eV) minority electron population. Though these warm electrons are…
The generation of parallel electric fields by the propagation of ion cyclotron waves in the plasma with a transverse density inhomogeneity was studied. It was proven that the minimal model required to reproduce the previous kinetic…
Electron bulk energization in the diffusion region during anti-parallel symmetric reconnection entails two stages. First, the inflowing electrons are adiabatically trapped and energized by an ambipolar parallel electric field. Next, the…
Magnetic reconnection is a process whereby magnetic field lines in different directions "reconnect" with each other, resulting in the rearrangement of magnetic field topology together with the conversion of magnetic field energy into the…
The recently developed energy conserving semi-implicit method (ECsim) for PIC simulation is applied to multiple scale problems where the electron-scale physics needs to be only partially retained and the interest is on the macroscopic or…
Magnetic reconnection is an explosive energy-release process in laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas. While magnetic fields can `break' and `reconnect' in a very small region called the electron diffusion region (EDR), there have…
While observations have suggested that power-law electron energy spectra are a common outcome of strong energy release during magnetic reconnection, e.g., in solar flares, kinetic simulations have not been able to provide definite evidence…
Three-dimensional (3D) magnetohydrodynamic simulations are carried out to explore magnetic reconnections in the presence of 3D magnetic nulls and quasi-separatrix layers (QSLs). The initial magnetic fields are created by superposing uniform…
Energetic electrons of up to tens of MeV are created during explosive phenomena in the solar corona. While many theoretical models consider magnetic reconnection as a possible way of generating energetic electrons, the precise roles of…
Magnetic reconnection is a leading mechanism for magnetic energy conversion and high-energy non-thermal particle production in a variety of high-energy astrophysical objects, including ones with relativistic ion-electron plasmas (e.g.,…