Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks: Fermi Process at Last?
Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks: Fermi Process at Last?
We present evidence that relativistic shocks propagating in unmagnetized plasmas can self-consistently accelerate particles. We use long-term two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations to study the well-developed shock structure in unmagnetized pair plasma. The particle spectrum downstream of such a shock consists of two components: a relativistic Maxwellian, with a characteristic temperature set …