Plasmoids in relativistic reconnection, from birth to adulthood: first they grow, then they go
By L. Sironi, D. Giannios, M. Petropoulou. 2016
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Blobs, or quasi-spherical emission regions containing relativistic particles and magnetic fields, are often assumed ad hoc in emission models of relativistic astrophysical jets, yet their physical origin is still not well understood. Here, we employ a suite of large-scale two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations in electron-positron plasmas to demonstrate that relativistic magnetic reconnection can naturally account for the formation of quasi-spherical plasmoids filled with high-energy particles and magnetic fields. Our simulations extend to unprecedentedly long temporal and spatial scales, so we can capture the asymptotic physics independently of the initial setup. We characterize the properties of the plasmoids that are continuously generated as a self-consistent by-product of the reconnection process: they are in rough energy equipartition between particles and magnetic fields; the upper energy cutoff of the plasmoid particle spectrum is proportional to the plasmoid width w, corresponding to a Larmor radius ~0.2 w; the plasmoids grow in size at ~0.1 of the speed of light, with most of the growth happening while they are still non-relativistic (first they grow); their growth is suppressed once they get accelerated to relativistic speeds by the field line tension, up to the Alfven speed (then they go). The largest plasmoids, whose typical recurrence interval is ~2.5 L/c, reach a characteristic size w ~ 0.2 L independently of the system length L, they have nearly isotropic particle distributions and they contain the highest energy particles, whose Larmor radius is ~0.03 L. The latter can be regarded as the Hillas criterion for relativistic reconnection. We briefly discuss the implications of our results for the high-energy emission from relativistic jets and pulsar winds.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3aa2d33d2a00f2916bdc85c59a264495e8aeb4b4
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Citations in the corpus
- Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model (2017, methodology): “The thickness of the current sheet is likely to be related to the plasma frequency (ωp), and accordingly we take `t ∼ ηpc/ωp; where ηp is a dimensionless parameter which could be of order 102–103 as suggested by numerical simulations (e.g. Sironi et al. 2016).”
- Ab-initio Pulsar Magnetosphere: Particle Acceleration in Oblique Rotators and High-energy Emission Modeling (2017, background): “In plasmoids energetic particles quickly cool down, and further possible acceleration via Fermi process in island mergers (Guo et al. 2014; Sironi et al. 2016) is not efficient. elsewhere.”
- The Interplay of Magnetically Dominated Turbulence and Magnetic Reconnection in Producing Nonthermal Particles (2019, background): “…consistently indicates that βR is an O(0.1) quantity (for relativistic pair plasmas, see, e.g, Zenitani et al. (2009); Bessho & Bhattacharjee (2012); Cerutti et al. (2012); Guo et al. (2014); Kagan et al. (2015); Liu et al. (2015); Sironi et al. (2016); Werner & Uzdensky (2017); Liu et al. (2017)).”
- Non-thermal particle acceleration in collisionless relativistic electron-proton reconnection (2016, unknown): “…Lyubarsky & Liverts 2008; Jaroschek & Hoshino 2009; Liu et al. 2011; Bessho & Bhattacharjee 2012; Kagan et al. 2013; Cerutti et al. 2012b, 2013, 2014a,b; Sironi & Spitkovsky 2011, 2014; Guo et al. 2014, 2015; Liu et al. 2015; Nalewajko et al. 2015; Sironi et al. 2015, 2016; Werner et al. 2016).”