Numerical Simulations of Particle Acceleration at Interplanetary Quasi-perpendicular Shocks

Abstract

Using test particle simulations we study particle acceleration at highly perpendicular ( ) shocks under conditions of modeling magnetic turbulence. We adopt a backward-in-time method to solve the Newton–Lorentz equation using the observed shock parameters for quasi-perpendicular interplanetary shocks, and compare the simulation results with ACE /EPAM observations to obtain the injection energy and timescale of particle acceleration. With our modeling and observations, we find that a large upstream speed is responsible for efficient particle acceleration. Our results also show that the quasi-perpendicular shocks are capable of accelerating thermal particles to high energies of the order of MeV for both kappa and Maxwellian upstream distributions, which may originate from the fact that in our model, the local background magnetic field has a component parallel to the shock normal.