Related papers: Stochastic Particle Acceleration in Parallel Relat…
This paper summarizes recent progresses in our theoretical understanding of particle acceleration at relativistic shock waves and it discusses two salient consequences: (1) the maximal energy of accelerated particles; (2) the impact of the…
Imagine a swarm of free particles near a point P outside a gravitating mass M and a free reference particle at P that is on a radial escape trajectory away from M. Relative to this reference particle and in a Fermi normal coordinate system…
Observations of minute-scale flares in TeV Blazars place constraints on particle acceleration mechanisms in those objects. The implications for a variety of radiation mechanisms have been addressed in the literature; in this paper we…
We investigate shock structure and particle acceleration in relativistic magnetized collisionless pair shocks by means of 2.5D and 3D particle-in-cell simulations. We explore a range of inclination angles between the pre-shock magnetic…
Particle acceleration at astrophysical shocks may be very efficient if magnetic scattering is self-generated by the same particles. This nonlinear process adds to the nonlinear modification of the shock due to the dynamical reaction of the…
This paper presents a new method of Monte-Carlo simulations of test particle Fermi acceleration at relativistic shocks. The particle trajectories in tangled magnetic fields are integrated out exactly from entry to exit through the shock,…
Binary systems can be powerful sources of non-thermal emission from radio to gamma rays. When the latter are detected, then these objects are known as gamma-ray binaries. In this work, we explore, in the context of gamma-ray binaries,…
Cosmic rays are charged particles that are accelerated to relativistic speeds by astrophysical shocks. Numerical models have been successful in confirming the acceleration process for (quasi-)parallel shocks, which have the magnetic field…
We determine the spectrum of particles accelerated at shocks with arbitrary speed and arbitrary scattering properties for different choices of the equation of state of the downstream plasma. More specifically we consider the effect of…
Shear flows are naturally expected to occur in astrophysical environments and potential sites of continuous non-thermal Fermi-type particle acceleration. Here we investigate the efficiency of expanding relativistic outflows to facilitate…
We review the acceleration of energetic particles in relativistic astrophysical jets characterized by a significant velocity shear. The possible formation of power-law momentum spectra is discussed and typical acceleration timescales are…
We report on a new Monte Carlo method for simulating diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) of solar energetic particles at upstream and downstream regions of quasi-parallel collisionless shock waves under the influence of self-generated…
We calculate the temporal evolution of distributions of relativistic electrons subject to synchrotron and adiabatic processes and Fermi-like acceleration in shocks. The shocks result from Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in the jet. Shock…
Particle acceleration at plasma shocks appears to be ubiquitous in the universe, spanning systems in the heliosphere, supernova remnants, and relativistic jets in distant active galaxies and gamma-ray bursts. This review addresses some of…
We investigate shock structure and particle acceleration in relativistic magnetized collisionless electron-ion shocks by means of 2.5D particle-in-cell simulations with ion-to-electron mass ratios (m_i/m_e) ranging from 16 to 1000. We…
Two-dimensional particle simulations of a relativistic Harris current sheet of pair plasmashave demonstrated that the system is unstable to the relativistic drift kink instability (RDKI) and that a new kind of acceleration process takes…
A comprehensive review is given of the various processes proposed for accelerating particles by shocks to high energies. These energies are limited by several bounds: the non-relativistic nature of the heliospheric collisionless shocks to…
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…
We give a short review of processes of stochastic acceleration in the Galaxy. We discuss: how to estimate correctly the number of accelerated particles, and at which condition the stochastic mechanism is able to generate power-law…
We review the present status of the cosmic ray acceleration theory in mildly relativistic shock waves. Due to the involved substantial particle anisotropies analytical methods can tackle only simple situations involving weakly turbulent…