Related papers: Electron acceleration and heating in collisionless…
Context. We introduce a model for including accelerated particles in pure magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of the solar atmosphere. Aims. We show that the method is viable and produces results that enhance the realism of MHD…
This work presents a magnetic reconnection experiment in which the kinetic, magnetic and thermal properties of the plasma each play an important role in the overall energy balance and structure of the generated reconnection layer. Magnetic…
High Mach number collisionless shocks are found in planetary systems and supernova remnants (SNRs). Electrons are heated at these shocks to the temperature well above the Rankine-Hugoniot prediction. However processes responsible for…
We simulate magnetic reconnection in electron-positron (pair) plasma using a collisionless two-fluid model with isotropic pressure. In this model the resistive, Hall, and electrokinetic pressure terms are absent from the curl of Ohm's law,…
This study investigates the localized electron heating in a bulk overdense plasma. The method relies on using a time dependent magnetic field. An initially high external magnetic field imposed on the overdense plasma target enables the…
Shock waves propagating in collisionless heliospheric and astrophysical plasmas have been studied extensively over the decades. One prime motivation is to understand the nonthermal particle acceleration at shocks. Although the theory of…
The energy partition in high Mach number collisionless shock waves is central to a wide range of high-energy astrophysical environments. We present a new theoretical model for electron heating that accounts for the energy exchange between…
We simulate, using a particle-in-cell code, the chain of acceleration processes at work during the Compton-based interaction of a dilute electron-ion plasma with an extreme-intensity, incoherent gamma-ray flux with a photon density several…
We study processes at the transition region between hot (rare) and cold (dense) plasma in the collisionless regime. We use a 3-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (3-D PIC) relativistic code. Motivated by the transition region in…
Particles are heated efficiently through energy conversion processes such as shocks and magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasma environments. While empirical scaling laws for the temperature increase have been obtained, the precise…
Magnetic reconnection requires the violation of the frozen-in condition which ties gyrating charged particles to the magnetic field inhibiting diffusion. Ongoing reconnection has been identified in near-Earth space as being responsible for…
lasma instabilities excited in collisionless shocks are responsible for particle acceleration. We have investigated the particle acceleration and shock structure associated with an unmagnetized relativistic electron-positron jet propagating…
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 article, we study the physics of charged particle energization inside a strongly turbulent plasma, where current sheets naturally appear in evolving large-scale magnetic topologies, but they are split into two populations of…
An effective theory of laser--plasma based particle acceleration is presented. Here we treated the plasma as a continuous medium with an index of refraction $n_{m}$ in which a single electron propagates. Because of the simplicity of this…
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…
A study of collisionless external shocks in gamma-ray bursts is presented. The shock structure, electromagnetic fields, and process of electron acceleration are assessed by performing a self-consistent 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation.…
In the innermost regions of low-luminosity accretion flows, including Sgr A* at the center of our Galaxy, the frequency of Coulomb collisions is so low that the plasma is two-temperature, with the ions substantially hotter than the…
Electron and ion energization (i.e., heating and nonthermal acceleration) is a fundamental, but poorly understood, outcome of plasma turbulence. In this work, we present new results on this topic from particle-in-cell simulations of driven…
We present a detailed study of magnetic reconnection in a quasi-two-dimensional pulsed-power driven laboratory experiment. Oppositely directed magnetic fields $(B=3$ T), advected by supersonic, sub-Alfv\'enic carbon plasma flows…