Particle Acceleration by Magnetic Reconnection in Relativistic Jets: The Transition from Small to Large Scales

Abstract

Several MHD works, and, in particular, the recent one by Medina-Torrejón et al. based on three-dimensional MHD simulations of relativistic jets, have evidenced that particle acceleration by magnetic reconnection driven by the turbulence in the flow occurs from the resistive up to the large injection scale of the turbulence. Particles experience Fermi-type acceleration up to ultrahigh energies, predominantly of the parallel velocity component to the local magnetic field, in the reconnection layers in all scales due to the ideal electric fields of the background fluctuations (V × B, where V and B are the velocity and magnetic field of the fluctuations, respectively). In this work, we show MHD-particle-in-cell (MHD-PIC) simulations following the early stages of the particle acceleration in the relativistic jet, which confirm these previous results, demonstrating the strong potential of magnetic reconnection driven by turbulence to accelerate relativistic particles to extreme energies in magnetically dominated flows. Our results also show that the dynamical time variations of the background magnetic fields do not influence the acceleration of the particles in this process.