The Morphology and Dynamics of Relativistic Jets with Relativistic Equation of State

Abstract

We study the effect of plasma composition on the dynamics and morphology of the relativistic astrophysical jets. Our work is based on a relativistic total variation diminishing (TVD) simulation code. We use a relativistic equation of state in the simulation code which accounts for the thermodynamics of a multispecies plasma which is a mixture of electrons, positrons, and protons. To study the effect of plasma composition we consider various jet models. These models are characterized by the same injection parameters, same jet kinetic luminosity, and the same Mach numbers. The evolution of these models shows that the plasma composition affects the jet head propagation speed, the structure of the jet head, and the morphology despite fixing the initial parameters. We conclude that the electron-positron jets are the slowest and show more pronounced turbulent structures in comparison to other plasma compositions. The area and locations of the hot-spots also depend on the composition of jet plasma. Our results also show that boosting mechanisms are also an important aspect of multi-dimensional simulations which are also influenced by the change in composition.