Abstract
A rotating pulsar creates a surrounding pulsar wind nebula (PWN) by steadily releasing an energetic wind into the interior of the expanding shockwave of supernova remnant or interstellar medium. At the termination shock of a PWN, the Poynting-flux- dominated relativistic striped wind is compressed. Magnetic reconnection is driven by the compression and converts magnetic energy into particle kinetic energy and accelerating particles to high energies. We carrying out particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to study the shock structure as well as the energy conversion and particle acceleration mechanism. By analyzing particle trajectories, we find that many particles are accelerated by Fermi-type mechanism. The maximum energy for electrons and positrons can reach hundreds of TeV.
Highlights
High-energy emissions have been detected in both young pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) such as the Crab nebula and mid-age PWNe such as the Geminga nebula[1]
In the synchrotron spectra of PWNe, the spectral break between the radio and the X-ray cannot be explained by synchrotron cooling and is believed to be attributed to the particle acceleration at the termination shock[9,10,11]
While a growing body of research using PIC methods focus on the particle acceleration in the spontaneous relativistic magnetic reconnection in the magnetically dominated regime, in this work we extended the study by setting up a simulation with shock driven magnetic reconnection at the termination shock of relativistic striped wind
Summary
High-energy emissions have been detected in both young pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) such as the Crab nebula and mid-age PWNe such as the Geminga nebula[1]. The high-energy electrons and positrons need to be produced by a particle acceleration in the nebula[4]. How pulsar winds efficiently accelerate electrons and positrons to high energies is a major puzzle and holds the key of understanding the near-earth positron anomaly[1, 4,5,6] as well as gamma rays from the Galactic Center[1, 7, 8]. Particle acceleration in relativistic magnetic reconnection has been a recent topic of strong interests. We carry out two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to model the relativistic striped wind interacting with the termination shock near the equatorial plane of obliquely rotating pulsars.
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