Understand
Electron and ion energization (i.e., heating and nonthermal acceleration) is a fundamental, but poorly understood, outcome of plasma turbulence.
- In this work, we present new results on this topic from particle-in-cell simulations of driven turbulence in collisionless, relativistic electron-ion plasma.
- We focus on temperatures such that ions (protons) are sub-relativistic and electrons are ultra-relativistic, a regime relevant for high-energy astrophysical systems such as hot accretion flows onto black holes.
- We find that ions tend to be preferentially heated, gaining up to an order of magnitude more energy than electrons, and propose a simple empirical formula to describe the electron-ion energy partition as a function of the ratio of electron-to-ion gyroradii (which in turn is a function of initial temperatures and plasma beta).