Beamlets from stochastic acceleration

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2008 Sep;78(3 Pt 2):036201. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.78.036201. Epub 2008 Sep 3.

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of a realization of the stochastic Fermi acceleration mechanism. The model consists of test particles moving between two oscillating magnetic clouds and differs from the usual Fermi-Ulam model in two ways. (i) Particles can penetrate inside clouds before being reflected. (ii) Particles can radiate a fraction of their energy during the process. Since the Fermi mechanism is at work, particles are stochastically accelerated, even in the presence of the radiated energy. Furthermore, due to a kind of resonance between particles and oscillating clouds, the probability density function of particles is strongly modified, thus generating beams of accelerated particles rather than a translation of the whole distribution function to higher energy. This simple mechanism could account for the presence of beamlets in some space plasma physics situations.