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Related papers: Relativistic Collisionless Shocks in Inhomogeneous…

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Shock acceleration is an 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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 K. -I. Nishikawa , P. Hardee , G. Richardson , R. Preece , H. Sol , G. J. Fishman

We present results from three-dimensional particle simulations of collisionless shocks with relativistic counter-streaming ion-electron plasmas. Particles are followed over many skin depths downstream of the shock. Open boundaries allow the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 J. Trier Frederiksen , C. B. Hededal , T. Haugboelle , A. Nordlund

The acceleration of charged particles at astrophysical collisionless shock waves is one of the best studied processes for the energization of particles to ultrarelativistic energies, required by multifrequency observations in a variety of…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Pasquale Blasi

Collisionless shock waves have long been considered amongst the most prolific particle accelerators in the universe. Shocks alter the plasma they propagate through and often exhibit complex evolution across multiple scales. Interplanetary…

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…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-18 Lorenzo Sironi , Anatoly Spitkovsky

Relativistic magnetically dominated turbulence is an efficient engine for particle acceleration in a collisionless plasma. Ultrarelativistic particles accelerated by interactions with turbulent fluctuations form non-thermal power-law…

Plasma Physics · Physics 2023-06-14 Cristian Vega , Stanislav Boldyrev , Vadim Roytershteyn

Relativistic shocks are present in all high-energy astrophysical processes involving relativistic plasma outflows interacting with their ambient medium. While a well understood process in the context of relativistic hydrodynamics and ideal…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-11-28 Argyrios Loules , Nektarios Vlahakis

Using our new 3-D relativistic electromagnetic particle (REMP) code parallelized with MPI, we investigated long-term particle acceleration associated with a relativistic electron-positron jet propagating in an unmagnetized ambient…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2014-11-20 K. -I. Nishikawa , J. Niemiec , M. Medvedev , B. Zhang , P. Hardee , Y. Mizuno , A. Nordlund , J. Frederiksen , H. Sol , M. Pohl , D. H. Hartmann , J. F. Fishman

Magnetic reconnection -- a fundamental plasma physics process, where magnetic field lines of opposite polarity annihilate -- is invoked in astrophysical plasmas as a powerful mechanism of nonthermal particle acceleration, able to explain…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-07-17 Lorenzo Sironi , Dmitri A. Uzdensky , Dimitrios Giannios

Pulsar wind nebulae are efficient particle accelerators, and yet the processes at work remain elusive. Self-generated, microturbulence is too weak in relativistic magnetized shocks to accelerate particles over a wide energy range,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-10-14 Benoît Cerutti , Gwenael Giacinti

Collisionless shocks follow the Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions to a good approximation. However, for a shock propagating parallel to a magnetic field, magnetohydrodynamics states that the shock properties are independent of the field…

Plasma Physics · Physics 2018-12-26 Antoine Bret , Ramesh Narayan

The course of non-thermal electron ejection in relativistic unmagnetized electron-ion shocks is investigated by performing self-consistent particle-in-cell simulations. The shocks are excited through the injection of relativistic jet into…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-08-24 Kazem Ardaneh , Dongsheng Cai , Ken-Ichi Nishikawa

Using fully kinetic simulations, we study the scaling of the inflow speed of collisionless magnetic reconnection from the non-relativistic to ultra-relativistic limit. In the anti-parallel configuration, the inflow speed increases with the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-23 Yi-Hsin Liu , Fan Guo , William Daughton , Hui Li , Michael Hesse

Collisionless tearing instability with a power-law distribution function in a relativistic pair plasma with a guide field is studied. When the current sheet is supported by plasma pressure, the tearing mode is suppressed as the particle…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-25 Ivan Demidov , Yuri Lyubarsky

We present 3D fully kinetic shearing-box simulations of pair-plasma magnetorotational turbulence with unprecedented macro-to-microscopic scale separation. While retrieving the expected fluid behavior of the plasma at large scales, we…

Relativistic magnetic turbulence has been proposed as a process for producing nonthermal particles in high-energy astrophysics. Particle energization may be contributed by both magnetic reconnection and turbulent fluctuations, but their…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-12-18 Divjyot Singh , Omar French , Fan Guo , Xiaocan Li

When two galaxy clusters encounter each other, the interaction results in a collisionless shock that is characterized by a low (1-4) sonic Mach number, and a high Alfv{\'e}nic Mach number. Our goal is to determine if, and to what extent,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-06-24 Allard Jan van Marle

Using our new 3-D relativistic electromagnetic particle (REMP) code parallelized with MPI, we investigated long-term particle acceleration associated with a relativistic electron-positron jet propagating in an unmagnetized ambient…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2011-01-26 K. -I. Nishikawa , J. Niemiec , M. Medvedev , B. Zhang , P. Hardee , A. Nordlund , J. Frederiksen , Y. Mizuno , H. Sol , M. Pohl , D. H. Hartmann , M. Oka , G. J. Fishman

The physics of instabilities in the precursor of relativistic collisionless shocks is of broad importance in high energy astrophysics, because these instabilities build up the shock, control the particle acceleration process and generate…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-18 M. Lemoine , G. Pelletier , L. Gremillet , I. Plotnikov

Energetic positrons have been observed in the interstellar medium, and high-energy positrons with relativistic energies up to approximately 1 TeV have been detected in Galactic cosmic rays. We conducted a study on the acceleration of…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-05-31 Huan Yu , Qi Xia , Jun Fang