Particle acceleration by magnetic reconnection in relativistic jets: the transition from small to large scales

Abstract

Several MHD works and, in particular, the recent one by Medina-Torrejon et al. (2021) based on three-dimensional MHD simulations of relativistic jets, have evidenced that particle acceleration by magnetic reconnection driven by the turbulence in the flow occurs from the resistive up to the large injection scale of the turbulence. Particles experience Fermi-type acceleration up to ultra-high-energies, predominantly of the parallel velocity component to the local magnetic field, in the reconnection layers in all scales due to the ideal electric fields of the background fluctuations ($V\times B$, where $V$ and $B$ are the velocity and magnetic field of the fluctuations, respectively). In this work, we show MHD-particle-in-cell (MHD-PIC) simulations following the early stages of the particle acceleration in the relativistic jet which confirm these previous results, demonstrating the strong potential of magnetic reconnection driven by turbulence to accelerate relativistic particles to extreme energies in magnetically dominated flows. Our results also show that the dynamical time variations of the background magnetic fields do not influence the acceleration of the particles in this process.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Investigating Turbulence Effects on Magnetic Reconnection Rates Through Three-Dimensional Resistive Magnetohydrodynamical Simulations
• Cosmic Ray Diffusion in the Turbulent Interstellar Medium: Effects of Mirror Diffusion and Pitch Angle Scattering
• Do plasmoids induce fast magnetic reconnection in well-resolved current sheets in 2D MHD simulations?
• TeV gamma-ray spectral spikes produced by magnetic reconnection in blazar jets: the case of the 2014 high state of Markarian 501