Scientific Seminars

Magnetic reconnection powers the emission from blazar jets

Lorenzo Sironi
Columbia University, USA

2016-06-23    11:00    Merate - POE

In magnetically-dominated jets, magnetic reconnection is often invoked as a mechanism to transfer the jet magnetic energy to the emitting particles, thus powering the observed non-thermal emission. With 2D and 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) kinetic simulations, we show that magnetic reconnection in blazar jets satisfies all the basic conditions for the emission: extended non-thermal particle distributions (with power-law slope between -3 and -1), efficient dissipation and rough equipartition between particles and magnetic field in the emitting region. In addition, relativistic magnetic islands generated by reconnection can power the ultra-fast bright flares observed from a number of TeV blazars.