Related papers: Are GRB shocks mediated by the Weibel instability?
The physics of collisionless relativistic shocks with a moderate magnetization is presented. Micro-physics is relevant to explain the most energetic radiative phenomena of Nature, namely that of the termination shock of Gamma Ray Bursts. A…
Excitation of Weibel magnetic fields in an initially non-magnetized though anisotropic plasma may trigger other low-frequency instabilities fed by pressure anisotropy. It is shown that under Weibel-like-stable conditions the Weibel-like…
The shape of the anisotropic velocity distribution function, beyond the realm of strict Maxwellians can play a significant role in determining the evolution of the Weibel instability dictating the dynamics of self-generated magnetic fields.…
Global linear stability analysis of a self-similar solution describing a relativistic shell decelerated by an ambient medium is performed. The system is shown to be subject to the convective Rayleigh-Taylor instability, with a rapid growth…
Several recent surprises appear dramatically to have improved the likelihood that the spin of rapidly rotating, newly formed neutron stars (and, possibly, of old stars spun up by accretion) is limited by a nonaxisymmetric instability driven…
When the ion mean free path much exceeds the Larmor radius in a plasma, the viscous stress tensor is altered dramatically, and depends only upon quantities measured along the field lines. This regime corresponds to typical interstellar…
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…
We are demonstrating in what way slowing down ultrarelativistic shocks are creating GRB lags. The reflection process produces positive lags and Cracow acceleration process negative lags. We present a way the seed particles are injected into…
We consider a recently discovered class of instabilities, driven by cosmic ray streaming, in a variety of environments. We show that although these instabilities have been discussed primarily in the context of supernova driven interstellar…
It is known that the perturbative instability of tensor excitations in higher derivative gravity may not take place if the initial frequency of the gravitational waves are below the Planck threshold. One can assume that this is a natural…
Particle-in-cell simulations are used to investigate the formation of magnetic fields, B, in plasmas with perpendicular electron density and temperature gradients. For system sizes, L, comparable to the ion skin depth, d_i, it is shown that…
A critical component of particle acceleration in astrophysical shocks is the non-resonant (Bell) instability, where the streaming of cosmic rays (CRs) leads to the amplification of magnetic fields necessary to scatter particles. In this…
It is shown that an ultrarelativistic shock with the Lorentz factor of order of tens or higher propagating in a moderately dense interstellar medium (density above $\sim 1000 $ cm$^{-3}$) undergoes a fast dramatic transformation into a…
The time evolution and saturation of the Weibel instability at the ion Alfv\'en current are presented by ab initio particle-in-cell simulations. We found that the ion Weibel current in 3D could evolve into the Alfv\'en current where the…
A two-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulation with the realistic ion-to-electron mass ratio of 1836 is carried out to investigate the electrostatic collisionless shocks in relatively high-speed (~3000 km s^-1) plasma flows…
In this work, we investigate collisionless shocks propagating in a relativistically hot unmagnetized electron-positron plasmas. We estimate the dissipation fraction at shocks in the relativistically hot plasma, showing that it is…
We study the separation of matter and antimatter driven by the growth of the Weibel instability in a matter-antimatter plasma. The plasma under consideration comprises protons and antiprotons initially at rest, along with a relativistic…
We investigate here the effects of plasma instabilities driven by rapid electron/positron pair cascades, which arise in the environment of GRB sources as a result of back-scattering of a seed fraction of the original spectrum. The injection…
It is usually believed that the geo-dynamo of the Earth or more generally of other planets, is created by the convective fluid motions inside their molten cores. An alternative to this thermal or compositional convection can however be…
How electrons get accelerated to relativistic energies in a high-Mach-number quasi-perpendicular shock is presented by means of ab initio particle-in-cell simulations in three dimensions. We found that coherent electrostatic Buneman waves…