Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Plasma Turbulence

Understand

Due to its ubiquitous presence, turbulence is often invoked to explain the origin of nonthermal particles in astrophysical sources of high-energy emission.

• With particle-in-cell simulations, we study decaying turbulence in magnetically-dominated (or equivalently, "relativistic") pair plasmas.
• We find that the generation of a power-law particle energy spectrum is a generic by-product of relativistic turbulence.
• The power-law slope is harder for higher magnetizations and stronger turbulence levels.