The interplay of magnetically-dominated turbulence and magnetic reconnection in producing nonthermal particles

By means of fully-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations, we have investigated the interplay between turbulence and reconnection in generating nonthermal particles in magnetically-dominated pair plasmas. A generic by-product of turbulence with spontaneous formation of reconnecting current sheets is the generation of an extended nonthermal particle spectrum with a power-law energy range. The features of the particle energy spectrum and the physics of the particle acceleration mechanisms can be found in Comisso and Sironi, "The interplay of magnetically-dominated turbulence and magnetic reconnection in producing nonthermal particles", arXiv:1909.01420 (2019), https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01420. Here, we have uploaded animations related to Figures 2 and 24 of this paper, obtained from the results of the reference 3D simulation (see Table 1 in the paper). The animation ken_downsampled.mp4 illustrates the mean kinetic energy per particle in different xy-slices of the 3D domain (at fixed time ct/l=2.7). The animation jz_downsampled.mp4 shows the current density along the mean magnetic field in different xy-slices of the 3D domain (at fixed time ct/l=2.7). The animations indicate that the initial particle energization is well correlated with current sheets.