"3D Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Relativistic Current Sheets with Synchrotron Cooling"
by Alexander Chernoglazov
Friday, April 7, 2023 -- 12:00 p.m.
Large Conference Room, 1207 Energy Research Facility
Advisor: Professor Sasha Philippov
We present first-principles particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of three-dimensional relativistic magnetic reconnection in a pair plasma with strong synchrotron cooling and a small mass fraction of non-radiating ions. We demonstrate that the structure of the current sheet strongly depends on the efficiency of cooling: specifically, strong cooling leads to strong compression of the plasma and magnetic field inside three-dimensional flux tubes. We demonstrate that ions are efficiently accelerated in a strongly cooled current sheet, forming a hard power-law energy distribution with an index of -1, while pair energies are limited by the plasma magnetization parameter. We find that high-energy radiation above the synchrotron burnoff limit (16 MeV) is only efficiently produced when the radiation cooling significantly affects particles with relatively low Lorentz factors. In this regime, we find that the highest energy photons are beamed along the direction of the upstream magnetic field. Our findings have implications for the properties of high-energy radiation in magnetospheres of black holes and neutron stars, and for ion acceleration in pulsars.
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