Efficiency of Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in Magnetic Reconnection
arXiv:2203.15169 · doi:10.1063/5.0086316
Abstract
The nonthermal particle acceleration during magnetic reconnection remains a fundamental topic in several astrophysical phenomena, such as solar flares, pulsar wind, magnetars, etc, for more than half a century, and one of the unresolved questions is its efficiency. Recently, nonthermal particle acceleration mechanisms during reconnection have been extensively studied by particle-in-cell simulations, yet it is an intriguing enigma as to how the magnetic field energy is divided into thermally heated plasmas and nonthermal particles. Here we study both non-relativistic and relativistic magnetic reconnections using large-scale particle-in-cell simulation for a pair plasma, and indicate that the production of the nonthermal particle becomes efficient with increasing the plasma temperature. In the relativistic hot plasma case, we determine that the heated plasmas by reconnection can be approximated by a kappa distribution function with the kappa index of approximately 3 or less (equivalent to 2 or less for the power-law index), and the nonthermal energy density of reconnection is approximately over 95% of the total internal energy in the downstream exhaust.
11 pages, 8 figures
References in corpus (8)
- Formation of Hard Power-laws in the Energetic Particle Spectra Resulting from Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection
- The Mechanisms of Electron Heating and Acceleration during Magnetic Reconnection
- Electron and proton heating in trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection
- Electron Heating During Magnetic Reconnection: A Simulation Scaling Study
- Recent Progress on Particle Acceleration and Reconnection Physics during Magnetic Reconnectionin the Magnetically-dominated Relativistic Regime
- Electron and Proton Heating in Transrelativistic Guide Field Reconnection
- Stabilization of Magnetic Reconnection in Relativistic Current Sheet
- Nonlinear Explosive Magnetic Reconnection in a Collisionless System