Abstract
Astrophysical relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, and pulsars is the main key subject of study in the field of high-energy astrophysics, especially regarding the jet interaction with the interstellar or intergalactic environment. In this work, we review studies of particle-in-cell simulations of relativistic electron–proton (e−−p+) and electron–positron (e±) jets, and we compare simulations that we have conducted with the relativistic 3D TRISTAN-MPI code for unmagnetized and magnetized jets. We focus on how the magnetic fields affect the evolution of relativistic jets of different compositions, how the jets interact with the ambient media, how the kinetic instabilities such as the Weibel instability, the kinetic Kelvin–Helmholtz instability and the mushroom instability develop, and we discuss possible particle acceleration mechanisms at reconnection sites.
Highlights
The transfer of the enormous amount of energy transferred from a generating black hole to a jetted plasma can be explained via two early theories: (i) the Blandford–Znajek process [5] describes how the energy from magnetic fields in relativistic jets is extracted from around an Active GalacticNuclei (AGN) accretion disk by the magnetic fields’ dragging and twisting as the black hole spins, which as a consequence launches relativistic material by the tightening of the magnetic field lines; (ii) Punsly and Coroniti [6] argued that the steady-state solutions of Blandford and Znajek, where the inertia of plasma particles was completely ignored while their electric charges remained accounted for as if in a perfectly conducting medium, were lacking causal connectivity and could not hold in a time-dependent framework
PIC simulations for relativistic jets containing helical magnetic fields were for the first time conducted by [67], followed by a series of spatiotemporally advanced simulation studies in, e.g., [15,18,19,20,70], which we present in Section 3 of this paper
Lines) at t = 1000 ωpe PIC simulations have become more and more powerful, constituting an excellent tool to study the physical properties of relativistic jets in many highly energetic astrophysical environments such as AGNs, Gamma-ray Bursts (GRB), and pulsars
Summary
Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter while omnipresent throughout the Cosmos. Observations show that jets are symbiotic with the activity of central black holes in AGN [8] and in other sources such as in GRBs [9], as well as in pulsars [3]. Among these highly energetic jetted sources, two of them, the GRBs and blazars—the latter being a class of AGNs with a relativistic jet directed nearly towards an observer—produce the brightest electromagnetic phenomena [10]. In the dynamic environment of jetted sources, it is theorized that particle acceleration occurs via different mechanisms, which may be able to achieve the highest level of energies resulting in the observed cosmic-ray spectrum
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