THE EXTENT OF POWER-LAW ENERGY SPECTRA IN COLLISIONLESS RELATIVISTIC MAGNETIC RECONNECTION IN PAIR PLASMAS

By Gregory R. Werner, Dmitri A. Uzdensky, B. Cerutti, Krzysztof Nalewajko, M. Begelman. 2014

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Using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we characterize the energy spectra of particles accelerated by relativistic magnetic reconnection (without guide field) in collisionless electron–positron plasmas, for a wide range of upstream magnetizations σ and system sizes L. The particle spectra are well-represented by a power law γ − &agr; ?> , with a combination of exponential and super-exponential high-energy cutoffs, proportional to σ and L, respectively. For large L and σ, the power-law index α approaches about 1.2.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbc3402111cebc2aaf5ec834fe7473cb240c9c70

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Citations in the corpus

• Magnetic Reconnection and Hot Spot Formation in Black Hole Accretion Disks (2020, background): “…studies of current sheets we know that magnetic reconnection can accelerate electrons in plasmoids to form non-thermal energy distributions (Sironi & Spitkovsky 2014; Guo et al. 2014; Werner et al. 2015; Rowan et al. 2017; Werner et al. 2018) potentially explaining the observed flaring emission.”