Speaker
Prof.
Quanming Lu
(University of Science and Technology of China)
Description
A large scale two-dimensional (2-D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation is
performed in
this paper to investigate electron acceleration in the dipolarization front
(DF) region
during magnetic reconnection. It is found that the DF is mainly driven
by an ion
outflow which also generates a positive potential region behind the DF.
The DF
propagates with an almost constant speed and gets growing, while the
electrons
in the DF region can be highly energized in the perpendicular direction
due to
betatron acceleration. For the first time, we reveal that there exists a
velocity
threshold, only the electrons below the threshold can be trapped by the
parallel
electric potential in the DF region and then energetized by betatron
acceleration.
Primary author
Prof.
Quanming Lu
(University of Science and Technology of China)
