Particle acceleration and radiation friction effects in the filamentation instability of pair plasmas

Abstract

The evolution of the filamentation instability produced by two counter-streaming pair plasmas is studied with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations in both one (1D) and two (2D) spatial dimensions. Radiation friction effects on particles are taken into account. After an exponential growth of both the magnetic field and the current density, a nonlinear quasi-stationary phase sets up characterized by filaments of opposite currents. During the nonlinear stage, a strong broadening of the particle energy spectrum occurs accompanied by the formation of a peak at twice their initial energy. A simple theory of the peak formation is presented. The presence of radiative losses does not change the dynamics of the instability but affects the structure of the particle spectra.

8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (3)

• Particle acceleration in relativistic collisionless shocks: Fermi process at last?
• Radiation Reaction Effects on Radiation Pressure Acceleration
• Long Term Evolution of Magnetic Turbulence in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks: Electron-Positron Plasmas

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Classical Radiation Reaction in Particle-In-Cell Simulations
• Giant collimated gamma-ray flashes
• Electron Weibel Instability in Relativistic Counter-Streaming Plasmas with Flow-Aligned External Magnetic Fields
• Precursor Wave Emission Enhanced by Weibel Instability in Relativistic Shocks
• Radio Emission by Soliton Formation in Relativistically Hot Streaming Pulsar Pair Plasmas
• Refining pulsar radio emission due to streaming instabilities: Linear theory and PIC simulations in a wide parameter range
• Optimising PICCANTE - an Open Source Particle-in-Cell Code for Advanced Simulations on Tier-0 Systems
• Polarized light from the transportation of a matter-antimatter beam in a plasma
• Collisionless shock acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic ions in ultra-relativistic regime