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.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (16)

• The Internal-Collision-Induced Magnetic Reconnection and Turbulence (ICMART) Model of Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Numerical Tests of Fast Reconnection in Weakly Stochastic Magnetic Fields
• Relativistic Jets Shine through Shocks or Magnetic Reconnection?
• Density Fluctuations in MHD Turbulence: Spectra, Intermittency and Topology
• 3D Turbulent Reconnection: Theory, Tests and Astrophysical Implications
• Blazar flares powered by plasmoids in relativistic reconnection
• The Role of the Guide Field in Relativistic Pair Plasma Reconnection
• Particle acceleration in the driven relativistic reconnection
• Recent Progress on Particle Acceleration and Reconnection Physics during Magnetic Reconnectionin the Magnetically-dominated Relativistic Regime
• Determining the Dominant Acceleration Mechanism during Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Large-scale Systems
• Ion and Electron Acceleration in Fully Kinetic Plasma Turbulence
• Properties of the First-order Fermi acceleration in fast magnetic reconnection driven by turbulence in collisional MHD flows
• On the role of fast magnetic reconnection in accreting black hole sources
• A Constrained Transport Method for the Solution of the Resistive Relativistic MHD Equations
• Comment on "Nonideal Fields Solve the Injection Problem in Relativistic Reconnection"
• The impact of resistive electric fields on particle acceleration in reconnection layers

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Resistive relativistic MHD simulations of astrophysical jets
• Multi-messenger emission from magnetic reconnection in blazar jets: the case of TXS 0506+056
• 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