Reconnection Simulations for the affirmation of synchrotron induced photon distribution changes

Pulsars are essentially magnetized spinning neutron stars that emit radiation out of its magnetic poles. They are one of the potential remnants of a supernova. Magnetic reconnection is an astrophysical phenomenon where the colliding magnetic fields accelerate a beam of particles and produce radiation. Inherently, our knowledge on reconnection is limited because all we observe are the pulses of light form them. Using macroparticle with particle in cell codes driven by supercomputers, we simulate the reconnection process. Synchrotron radiation is light emitted by relativistic charged particles experiencing a magnetic field. This is impossible to avoid in reconnection and must be taken into account. The synchrotron radiation emitted by the reconnection particles causes them to lose some of their energy by a method called synchrotron radiation cooling. By performing simulations of reconnection with various synchrotron radiation cooling parameters, different particle distributions can be generated. From then, the particle distributions can be compared to observed photon distribution data from real pulsars. This poster discusses the accuracy of macroparticle simulations of local and global reconnection. In turn, implications of integrating synchrotron radiation cooling into the reconnection simulations and how the observed photon distributions can be found analogous to the simulated values are also discussed.