Particle Acceleration in a Shock Wave Propagating to an Inhomogeneous Medium

Wave Propagation in an Inhomogeneous Medium

Particle acceleration in an active medium.

When an electron moves along a vacuum channel in a dielectric material it may cause radiation to be emitted provided that its velocity is greater than the phase velocity of an electromagnetic plane wave in the medium. This is the socalled Čerenkov radiation. What a remote observer measures as electromagnetic energy comes at the expense of the particle’s kinetic energy or, in other words, the pa...

Alfvén wave transmission and particle acceleration in parallel shock waves

We study Alfvén wave transmission through parallel shocks. First, the paper corrects for mistakes made in a previous study by Campeanu & Schlickeiser on the same subject. It is shown, contrary to CS, that first-order Fermi acceleration by multiple shock crossings is generally more effective than stochastic acceleration in the downstream region. Moreover, we demonstrate that in a large region of...

Particle Acceleration by an Electromagnetic Wave

The relativistic equation of motion for an electrically charged massive point particle is integrated exactly for the case of a circularly polarized electromagnetic plane wave.The acceleration of the particle by the wave is calculated in detail, however, under neglection of the radiation damping. In spite of this simplification, the results are applied to a typical pulsar, where the maximum kine...

Particle acceleration at a dynamic termination shock

[1] We investigate the effects of a large-scale interplanetary disturbance, such as a merged interaction region (MIR), on the properties of the heliospheric termination shock and particle population accelerated at the shock. The interaction process between transient structures and the shock is reflected in energetic particle spectra through variability in shock location, its compression ratio, ...