Particle acceleration by magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability: mechanism for flares in black-hole accretion flows

Understand

We study the magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability in relativistic collisionless plasma, as an astrophysical process for nonthermal particle acceleration.

• We consider dense plasma on top of a highly magnetized cavity with sheared magnetic field.
• Using particle-in-cell simulations, we show that small plumes grow and merge progressively to form a large-scale plume, which broadens to drive rapid magnetic reconnection in the cavity.
• We find that this leads to efficient particle acceleration capable of explaining flares from the inner accretion flow onto the black hole Sgr A*.