Speaker
Description
Magnetic reconnection is a key mechanism for particle acceleration in astrophysical plasmas and has been widely studied using Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. Because of high computational cost, most studies are restricted to 2D geometries, which only capture dynamics within the reconnection plane. In contrast, fully 3D reconnection allows particles to escape the current sheet and experience additional acceleration from large-scale, out-of-plane electric fields.
In addition to the reconnecting magnetic component, a guide field perpendicular to the reconnection plane may also be present. Despite its potential importance, the influence of such a guide field on current sheet morphology and on the properties of accelerated particles has not been thoroughly explored, in fully three-dimensional setups.
In this work, we perform both two-dimensional and three-dimensional PIC simulations of pair-plasmas to assess the impact of the third spatial dimension on the reconnection process. For each geometry, we vary the guide-field strength as 0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, and 1.0 times the large-scale magnetic field to systematically assess its effect. Our results show that increasing the guide field suppresses reconnection, leading to a reduced reconnection rate, a steeper particle energy spectrum, and lower maximum Lorentz factors attained by the accelerated population.