Kinetic Particle-in-cell Simulations of the Transport of Astrophysical Relativistic Jets in Magnetized Intergalactic Medium

Abstract

We present results from fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of the transport of astrophysical relativistic jets in magnetized intergalactic medium. As opposed to magnetohydrodynamic simulations, the results show that a strong charge-separation electric field, induced by the different responses between jet electrons and ions to the magnetic fields, significantly enhances the energy exchange between different species of charged particles and electromagnetic fields, thus playing a key role in determining the collimation and shape of the jet spectral energy distribution (SED). It is found that when the magnetic field strength increases, the jet collimation also increases while the power-law slope of the jet SED decreases; this provides potential enlightenment on related astrophysical observations.