Mushroom-instability-driven Magnetic Reconnections in Collisionless Relativistic Jets

Abstract

Abstract We study the kinetic plasma dynamics in collisionless relativistic jets with velocity shear, by carrying out particle-in-cell simulations in the transverse plane of a jet. It is discovered that intermittent magnetic reconnections (MRs) are driven by mushroom instability (MI), which is an important kinetic-scale plasma instability in the plasma shear flows with relativistic bulk speed. We refer to this sequence of kinetic plasma phenomena as “MI-driven MR.” The MI-driven MRs intermittently occur with moving the location of the reconnection points from the vicinity of the initial velocity-shear surface toward the center of the jet. As a consequence, the number density of high-energy electrons that are accelerated by MI-driven MRs increases with time in the region inside the initial velocity-shear surface with the accompanying generation and subsequent amplification of magnetic fields by MI. The maximum Lorentz factor of electrons increases with initial bulk Lorentz factor of the jet. A possible relation of MI-driven MR to the bright synchrotron emission in the jet spine of an active galactic nucleus jet is also discussed.