Fermi acceleration in relativistic collisionless plasma shocks correlates with anisotropic energy gains

Abstract

Collisionless shocks generated by two colliding relativistic electron-positron plasma shells are studied using particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Shocks are mediated by the Weibel instability (WI), and the kinetic energy of the fastest accelerated particles is found to be anisotropically modified by WI-induced electric fields. Specifically, we show that all particles interacting with the shock bifurcate into two groups based on their final relativistic Lorentz factor $\gamma$: slow ($\gamma < \gamma_{bf}$) and fast ($\gamma > \gamma_{bf}$), where $\gamma_{bf}$ is the bifurcation Lorentz factor that was found to be approximately twice the initial (upstream) Lorentz factor $\gamma_0$. We have found that the energies of the slow particles are equally affected by the longitudinal and transverse components of the shock electric field, whereas the fast particles are primarily accelerated by the transverse field component.