Efficiency of Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in Magnetic Reconnection

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale particle-in-cell simulations to investigate how plasma temperature influences the efficiency of nonthermal particle acceleration during magnetic reconnection, revealing high nonthermal energy fractions in hot plasmas.

Contribution

It demonstrates that higher plasma temperatures significantly enhance nonthermal particle production and characterizes the resulting particle energy distribution in relativistic reconnection.

Findings

Nonthermal energy exceeds 95% of total internal energy in hot plasma reconnection.

Heated plasmas follow a kappa distribution with index around 3 or less.

Efficiency of nonthermal acceleration increases with plasma temperature.

Abstract

The nonthermal particle acceleration during magnetic reconnection remains a fundamental topic in several astrophysical phenomena, such as solar flares, pulsar wind, magnetars, etc, for more than half a century, and one of the unresolved questions is its efficiency. Recently, nonthermal particle acceleration mechanisms during reconnection have been extensively studied by particle-in-cell simulations, yet it is an intriguing enigma as to how the magnetic field energy is divided into thermally heated plasmas and nonthermal particles. Here we study both non-relativistic and relativistic magnetic reconnections using large-scale particle-in-cell simulation for a pair plasma, and indicate that the production of the nonthermal particle becomes efficient with increasing the plasma temperature. In the relativistic hot plasma case, we determine that the heated plasmas by reconnection can be approximated by a kappa distribution function with the kappa index of approximately 3 or less (equivalent to 2 or less for the power-law index), and the nonthermal energy density of reconnection is approximately over 95% of the total internal energy in the downstream exhaust.