A Model for Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection

Abstract

The past decade has seen an outstanding development of nonthermal particle acceleration in magnetic reconnection in magnetically-dominated systems, with clear signatures of power-law energy distributions as a common outcome of first-principles kinetic simulations. Here we propose a semi-analytical model for systematically investigating nonthermal particle acceleration in reconnection. We show particle energy distributions are well determined by particle injection, acceleration, and escape processes. Using a series of kinetic simulations, we accurately evaluate the energy- and time-dependent model coefficients. The resulting spectral characteristics, including the spectral index and lower and upper bounds of the power-law distribution, agree well with the simulation results. Finally, we apply the model to predict the power-law indices and break energies in astrophysical reconnection systems.

13 pages, 7 figures, published by ApJL

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Modeling the inner part of the jet in M87: Confronting jet morphology with theory
• Pitch-Angle Anisotropy Imprinted by Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection
• Concurrent Particle Acceleration and Pitch-Angle Anisotropy Driven by Magnetic Reconnection: Ion-Electron Plasmas
• Binary neutron star mergers as the source of the highest energy cosmic rays
• Low-energy Injection and Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Magnetic Turbulence
• Particle injection in three-dimensional relativistic magnetic reconnection
• On the statistical characterization of the synchrotron multi-zone polarization of blazars