Wakefield Acceleration in Relativistic Plasma Flows: Electron Acceleration to Cosmic Ray Energies

Energetic particles observed in astrophysical environments imply the existence of efficient particle accelerators. These accelerators could be driven by relativistically colliding plasma. Collisionless plasmas thermalize through the growth of electromagnetic and electrostatic waves and the subsequent wave-particle interactions. Kinetic interactions are potentially important in this context, since they can transfer significant energy to limited plasma phase space intervals and they thus constitute energy-efficient accelerators. Kinetic processes relevant to astroplasma physics can be modelled by relativistic particle-in-cell simulations. Here we revise this simulation method and apply it to ion-beam driven plasma wave accelerators that may be involved in the thermalization of supernova remnant shocks and the internal shocks of relativistic astrophysical jets