Particle Acceleration in the Driven Relativistic Reconnection

We study the compression driven magnetic reconnection in the relativistic electron-positron plasma. Making use of a 2.5D particle-in-cell code, we simulated compression of a magnetized plasma layer containing a current sheet within it. We found that the particle spectrum within the reconnecting sheet becomes non-thermal; it could be approximated by a power-law distribution with an index of -1 and an exponential cutoff.
Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, to appear in the ApJ August 10, 2008, v683n 1 issue