Origin of intense electron heating in relativistic blast waves

Abstract

The modeling of gamma-ray burst afterglow emission bears witness to strong electron heating in the precursor of Weibel-mediated, relativistic collisionless shock waves propagating in unmagnetized electron-ion plasmas. In this Letter, we propose a theoretical model, which describes electron heating via a Joule-like process caused by pitch-angle scattering in the decelerating, self-induced microturbulence and the coherent charge-separation field induced by the difference in inertia between electrons and ions. The emergence of this electric field across the precursor of electron-ion shocks is confirmed by large-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Integrating the model using a Monte Carlo-Poisson method, we compare the main observables to the PIC simulations to conclude that the above mechanism can indeed account for the bulk of electron heating.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures; to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Electron slingshot acceleration in relativistic preturbulent shocks explored via emitted photon polarization
• Electron heating in high Mach number collisionless shocks
• Saturation Level of Ion Weibel Instability and Isotropization Length Scale in Electron-Ion Weibel-Mediated Shocks
• Magnetic Field Amplification and Particle Acceleration in Weakly Magnetized Trans-relativistic Electron-ion Shocks
• Energy Dissipation in Strong Collisionless Shocks: The Crucial Role of Ion-to-Electron Scale Separation in Particle-in-Cell Simulations
• Ion-electron instabilities in the precursor of weakly magnetized, transrelativistic shocks
• Energy partition in collisionless counterstreaming plasmas
• Electron-Ion Temperature Ratio in Transrelativistic Unmagnetized Shock Waves
• Collisionless shocks having relativistic velocities in relativistically hot plasmas