Particle Acceleration from Magnetic Reconnection in Pulsar Wind Nebulae

An oblique-rotating pulsar generates a relativistic striped wind in a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) in which the Poynting-flux dominates. By carrying out particle-in-cell simulations of the termination shock of the PWN, we study the shock-reconnection structure as well as the energy conversion processes and particle acceleration mechanisms. With the recent advances in the numerical methods, we extend the simulations to the ultrarelativistic regime with a bulk Lorentz factor of up to γ0 = 10^6 . Magnetic reconnection at the termination shock is highly efficient at converting magnetic energy to particle kinetic energy and accelerating particles to high energies. Similar to earlier studies, we find that the resulting energy spectra crucially depend on λ/de (λ is the wavelength of the striped wind and de is the relativistic plasma skin depth). When λ/de is large (λ ~ 40de), the downstream particle spectra form a power-law distribution in the magnetically dominated relativistic wind regime. By analyzing particle trajectories and statistical quantities relevant to particle energization, we find that Fermi-type mechanism dominates the particle acceleration and power-law formation. We find that the results for particle acceleration are scalable as γ0 and σ0 increase to large values. The maximum energy for electrons and positrons can reach hundreds of TeV to PeV range if the wind has a bulk Lorentz factor of γ0 ≈ 10^6 and a magnetization parameter of σ0 = 10, which can explain the recent observations of high energy gamma rays from PWNe.