Relativistic Particle Acceleration in a Folded Current Sheet

Abstract

Two-dimensional particle simulations of a relativistic Harris current sheet of pair plasmashave demonstrated that the system is unstable to the relativistic drift kink instability (RDKI) and that a new kind of acceleration process takes place in the deformed current sheet. This process contributes to the generation of non-thermal particles and contributes to the fast magnetic dissipation in the current sheet structure. The acceleration mechanism and a brief comparison with relativistic magnetic reconnection are presented.

11 preprint pages, including 3 .eps figures

References in corpus (4)

• Reconnection in a striped pulsar wind
• The Generation of Nonthermal Particles in the Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection of Pair Plasmas
• Dissipation in Poynting-flux Dominated Flows: the Sigma-Problem of the Crab Pulsar Wind
• Spatial Variation of the X-ray spectrum of the Crab Nebula

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