Related papers: Particle Acceleration at shocks: some modern aspec…
Shock acceleration is an ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysical plasmas. Plasma waves and their associated instabilities (e.g., the Buneman instability, two-streaming instability, and the Weibel instability) created in the shocks are…
It is well known that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are capable of accelerating charged particles to very high energies. In many cases, the particle acceleration by black holes occurs electromagnetically through an…
The theory of shock acceleration predicts the maximum particle energy to be limited only by the acceleration time and the size (geometry) of the shock. This led to optimistic estimates for the galactic cosmic ray energy achievable in the…
The supernova paradigm for the origin of galactic cosmic rays has been deeply affected by the development of the non-linear theory of particle acceleration at shock waves. Here we discuss the implications of applying such theory to the…
The origin of the particles in the highest energy end of the cosmic ray spectrum is discussed in the context of the wider problem of the origin of the whole cosmic radiation as observed at the Earth. In particular we focus our attention on…
The expansion of a dense plasma through a more rarefied ionised medium is a phenomenon of interest in various physics environments ranging from astrophysics to high energy density laser- matter laboratory experiments. Here this situation is…
Relativistic current sheets have been proposed as the sites of dissipation in pulsar winds, jets in active galaxies and other Poynting-flux dominated flows. It is shown that the steady versions of these structures differ from their…
We consider the acceleration of particles due to a velocity shear in relativistic astrophysical flows. The basic physical picture and the formation of power law momentum spectra is discussed for a non-relativistic velocity field using a…
We investigate the acceleration of charged particles (both electrons and protons) at collisionless shocks predicted to exist in the vicinity of solar flares. The existence of standing termination shocks has been examined by flare models and…
Winds are ubiquitous in galaxies and often feature bubble structures. These wind bubbles are characterized by an external forward shock expanding in the surrounding medium and a wind termination shock separating the cool and fast wind from…
Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations have demonstrated that shock waves could be produced in the intergalactic medium by supersonic flow motions during the course of hierarchical clustering of the large-scale-structure in the Universe.…
Nonthermal radiation observed from astrophysical systems containing relativistic jets and shocks, e.g., active galactic nuclei (AGNs), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and Galactic microquasar systems usually have power-law emission spectra. Recent…
Using test particle simulations we study particle acceleration at highly perpendicular ($\theta_{Bn}\geq 75^\circ$) shocks under conditions of modeling magnetic turbulence. We adopt a backward-in-time method to solve the Newton-Lorentz…
Fermi acceleration by collisionless shocks is believed to be the primary mechanism to produce high energy charged particles in the Universe,where charged particles gain energy successively from multiple reflections off the shock…
We derive a relativistically covariant (although not manifestly so) equation for the distribution function of particles accelerated at shocks, which applies also to extremely relativistic shocks, and arbitrarily anisotropic particle…
Accretion flows onto supergalactic-scale structures are accompanied with large spatial scale shock waves. These shocks were postulated as possible sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The highest particle energies were expected for…
We use large hybrid (kinetic protons-fluid electrons) simulations to investigate the transport of energetic particles in self-consistent electromagnetic configurations of collisionless shocks. In previous papers of this series, we showed…
We derive the maximum accelerated particle energy from first-order and second-order Fermi acceleration at nonrelativistic and relativistic shocks for explosions taking place in a uniform surrounding medium. Second-order stochastic processes…
A cosmic acceleration mechanism is introduced which is based on the wakefields excited by the Alfven shocks in a relativistically flowing plasma, where the energy gain per distance of a test particle is Lorentz invariant. We show that there…
The physics of particle acceleration in turbulent plasmas is a topic of broad interest, which is making rapid progress thanks to dedicated, large-scale numerical experiments. The first part of this paper presents an effective theory of…