Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 127, Issue 18, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.185101
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, through the LDRD program
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, through Center for Space and Earth Science (CSES)
- NASA [NNH17AE68I, 80HQTR20T0073, 80NSSC20K0627, 80HQTR21T0005]
- NASA through the Astrophysical Theory Program
- National Science Foundation through the NSF/DOE Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering [PHY-1902867]
- NASA MMS [80NSSC18K0289]
- U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration
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Research shows that the flux-rope kink instability leads to strong field-line chaos in weak-guide-field regimes, allowing particles to transport more efficiently out of flux ropes and undergo acceleration. The results are highly relevant to observations of nonthermal particle acceleration in space and astrophysics.
The relaxation of field-line tension during magnetic reconnection gives rise to a universal Fermi acceleration process involving the curvature drift of particles. However, the efficiency of this mechanism is limited by the trapping of energetic particles within flux ropes. Using 3D fully kinetic simulations, we demonstrate that the flux-rope kink instability leads to strong field-line chaos in weak-guide-field regimes where the Fermi mechanism is most efficient, thus allowing particles to transport out of flux ropes and undergo further acceleration. As a consequence, both ions and electrons develop clear power-law energy spectra that contain a significant fraction of the released energy. The low-energy bounds are determined by the injection physics, while the high-energy cutoffs are limited only by the system size. These results have strong relevance to observations of nonthermal particle acceleration in space and astrophysics.
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