Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Magnetized Collisionless Pair Shocks: Dependence of Shock Acceleration on Magnetic Obliquity

Understand

We investigate shock structure and particle acceleration in relativistic magnetized collisionless pair shocks by means of 2.5D and 3D particle-in-cell simulations.

• We explore a range of inclination angles between the pre-shock magnetic field and the shock normal.
• We find that only magnetic inclinations corresponding to "subluminal" shocks, where relativistic particles following the magnetic field can escape ahead of the shock, lead to particle acceleration.
• The downstream spectrum in such shocks consists of a relativistic Maxwellian and a high-energy power-law tail with exponential cutoff.