Weibel Instability Driven by Relativistic Pair Jets: Particle Acceleration, Magnetic Field Generation, and Emission

Abstract

Shock acceleration is a ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysical plasmas. Plasma waves and their associated instabilities (e.g., Buneman, Weibel and other two-stream instabilities) created in collisionless shocks are responsible for particle (electron, positron, and ion) acceleration. Using a 3-D relativistic electromagnetic particle (REMP) code, we have investigated particle acceleration associated with a relativistic jet front propagating into an ambient plasma. We find that the growth times of the Weibel instability in electron-positron jets are not affected by the (electron-positron or electron-ion) ambient plasmas. However, the amplitudes of generated local magnetic fields in the electron-ion ambient plasma are significantly larger than those in the electron-positron ambient plasma.

6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Proceeding of the 22nd Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, Dcember 13-17, 2004, Stanford University

References in corpus (6)

• Generation of Magnetic Fields in the Relativistic Shock of Gamma-Ray-Burst Sources
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