Particle Acceleration and Radiation Signatures from Relativistic Plasma Turbulence

Nature's most powerful high-energy sources are capable of accelerating particles to high energy and radiating it away on extremely short timescales, even shorter than the light crossing time of the system. It is yet unclear what physical processes can produce such an efficient acceleration, despite the copious radiative losses. By means of radiative particle-in-cell simulations, we show that magnetically dominated plasma turbulence generates a non-thermal particle spectrum with a hard power-law range (slope p∼1) within a few eddy turnover times. The particle spectrum becomes even harder (p