Exact Calculation of Nonideal Fields Demonstrates Dominance of Injection in Relativistic Reconnection
arXiv:2309.08314 · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/acdb60
Abstract
Magnetic reconnection is an important source of energetic particles in systems ranging from astrophysics to the laboratory. The large separation of spatiotemporal scales involved makes it critical to determine the minimum physical model containing the necessary physics for modeling particle acceleration. By resolving the energy gain from ideal and nonideal magnetohydrodynamic electric fields self-consistently in kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of reconnection, we conclusively show the dominant role of the nonideal field for the early stage of energization known as injection. The importance of the nonideal field increases with magnetization, guide field, and in three-dimensions, indicating its general importance for reconnection in natural astrophysical systems. We obtain the statistical properties of the injection process from the simulations, paving the way for the development of extended MHD models capable of accurately modeling particle acceleration in large-scale systems. The novel analysis method developed in this study can be applied broadly to give new insight into a wide range of processes in plasma physics.
References in corpus (14)
- Relativistic Reconnection: an Efficient Source of Non-Thermal Particles
- Formation of Hard Power-laws in the Energetic Particle Spectra Resulting from Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection
- The Generation of Nonthermal Particles in the Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection of Pair Plasmas
- Electron Acceleration by Multi-Island Coalescence
- Phase Diagram for Magnetic Reconnection in Heliophysical, Astrophysical and Laboratory Plasmas
- One-to-one direct modeling of experiments and astrophysical scenarios: pushing the envelope on kinetic plasma simulations
- Exploiting multi-scale parallelism for large scale numerical modelling of laser wakefield accelerators
- Fast particle acceleration in three-dimensional relativistic reconnection
- Global Ten-Moment Multifluid Simulations of the Solar Wind Interaction with Mercury: From the Planetary Conducting Core to the Dynamic Magnetosphere
- Determining the Dominant Acceleration Mechanism during Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Large-scale Systems
- Electron Physics in 3D Two-Fluid Ten-Moment Modeling of Ganymede's Magnetosphere
- Exploring the acceleration mechanisms for particle injection and power-law formation during trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection
- Comment on "Nonideal Fields Solve the Injection Problem in Relativistic Reconnection"
- Dissipation in Relativistic Pair-plasma Reconnection: Revisited