“It is a fantastic honor to receive this. There have been so many scientists who
have been awarded this fellowship, many I respect and know. Being in the same category
as these people is just amazing,” Burke-Spolaor said. “It’s pleasing to be recognized
as an emerging leader in physics.”
One of the key questions in the study of relativistic jets is how magnetic reconnection occurs and whether it can effectively accelerate electrons in the jet. We performed 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of arelativistic pair and electron-proton jet of relatively large radius that carries a helical magnetic field. We focused our investigation on the interaction between the jet and the ambient plasma and explore how thehelical magnetic field affects the excitation of kinetic instabilities such as the Weibel instability (WI), the kinetic Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (kKHI), and the mushroom instability (MI). In our simulations these kinetic instabilities are indeed excited, and....
