Related papers: Particle acceleration and relativistic shocks
Particle acceleration and magnetic field amplification in relativistic shocks propagating in inhomogeneous media are investigated by three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations and test-particle simulations. The MHD…
A mathematical approach to investigate particle acceleration at shock waves moving at arbitrary speed in a medium with arbitrary scattering properties was first discussed in (Vietri 2003) and (Blasi & Vietri 2005}. We use this method and…
We calculate the spectrum of blast wave models of gamma-ray burst sources, for various assumptions about the magnetic field density and the relativistic particle acceleration efficiency. For a range of physically plausible models we find…
This proceedings paper reports on the theoretical modelling of particle acceleration in magnetised turbulent plasmas. It briefly reviews some recent findings obtained from fully kinetic numerical simulations of large-amplitude, semi to…
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…
Being the most extreme explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) provide a unique laboratory to study various plasma physics phenomena. The complex lightcurve and broad-band, non-thermal spectra indicate a very complicated system…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are a mixed class of sources consisting of, at least, the long duration and short-hard subclasses, the X-ray flashes, and the low-luminosity GRBs. In all cases, the release of enormous amounts of energy on a short…
Particle acceleration in relativistic shocks is studied analytically in the test-particle, small-angle scattering limit, for an arbitrary velocity-angle diffusion function D. Accurate analytic expressions for the spectral index s are…
A pedagogical derivation is presented of the ``fireball'' model of gamma-ray bursts, according to which the observable effects are due to the dissipation of the kinetic energy of a relativistically expanding wind, a ``fireball.'' The main…
In this thesis different numerical methods, as well as applications of the methods to a number of current problems in relativistic astrophysics, are presented. In the first part the theoretical foundation and numerical implementation of a…
I describe electromagnetic model of gamma ray bursts and contrast its main properties and predictions with hydrodynamic fireball model and its magnetohydrodynamical extension. The electromagnetic model assumes that rotational energy of a…
We calculate both analytically and numerically the evolution of a highly relativistic fireball through the stages of free expansion and coasting, and determine the dependence of the thermodynamic and radiation variables in the comoving and…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, gravitational waves are generated by the collisions of bubble walls and by the bulk motions caused in the fluid. A sizeable signal may result from fast-moving walls. In this work we study the…
Monte-Carlo computations for highly relativistic parallel shock particle acceleration are presented for upstream flow gamma factors, $\Gamma=(1-V_{1}^{2}/c^{2})^{-0.5}$ with values between 5 and $10^{3}$. The results show that the spectral…
A long standing problem in high energy astrophysics is the nature of galactic accelerators of particles with energies above PeV. Such objects are sources of galactic cosmic rays and can produce PeV-regime photons observed by ground-based…
How and where cosmic rays are produced, and how they diffuse through various turbulent media, represent fundamental problems in astrophysics with far reaching implications, both in terms of our theoretical understanding of high-energy…
We examine analytically and numerically the evolution of a relativistic fireball. We show that, after an early rearrangement phase, most of the matter and energy in the fireball is concentrated within a narrow shell. The shell propagates at…
The little we do know of the physical conditions in gamma-ray bursters makes them conducive to the acceleration of high-energy cosmic rays, especially if they are at cosmological distances. We find that, with the observed statistics and…
In high-energy astronomical phenomena, the stochastic particle acceleration by turbulences is one of the promising processes to generate non-thermal particles. In this paper, we investigate the energy-diffusion efficiency of relativistic…
We study the interaction of early-type stars with the jets of active galactic nuclei. A bow-shock will form as a consequence of the interaction of the jet with the winds of stars and particles can be accelerated up to relativistic energies…