In situ particle acceleration in collisionless shocks

The outflows from gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei and relativistic jets in general interact with the surrounding media through collisionless shocks. With three dimensional relativistic particle-in-cell simulations we investigate such shocks. The results from these experiments show that small-scale magnetic filaments with strengths of up to percents of equipartition are generated and that electrons are accelerated to power law distributions N(γ) ∝ γ−p in the vicinity of the filaments through a new acceleration mechanism. The acceleration is locally confined, instantaneous and differs from recursive acceleration processes such as Fermi acceleration. We find that the proposed acceleration mechanism competes with thermalization and becomes important at high Lorentz factors.