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Title: Generalized, Energy-conserving Numerical Simulations of Particles in General Relativity. II. Test Particles in Electromagnetic Fields and GRMHD

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online)
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3];  [4]
  1. Katholieke Univ. (KU) Leuven (Belgium)
  2. Katholieke Univ. (KU) Leuven (Belgium); Goethe Univ., Frankfurt (Germany)
  3. Goethe Univ., Frankfurt (Germany); Univ. of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
  4. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)

Observations of compact objects, in the form of radiation spectra, gravitational waves by LIGO/Virgo, and direct imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, are currently the main information sources on plasma physics in extreme gravity. Modeling such physical phenomena Requires numerical methods that allow for the simulation of microscopic plasma dynamics in the presence of both strong gravity and electromagnetic fields. In Bacchini et al. (2018), we presented a detailed study of numerical techniques for the integration of free geodesic motion. In this paper, we extend the study by introducing electromagnetic forces in the simulation of charged particles in curved spacetimes. We extend the Hamiltonian energy-conserving method presented in Bacchini et al. to include the Lorentz force, and we test its performance compared to that of standard explicit Runge–Kutta and implicit midpoint rule schemes against analytic solutions. Then, we show the application of the numerical schemes to the integration of test particle trajectories in general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations by modifying the algorithms to handle grid-based electromagnetic fields. We test this approach by simulating ensembles of charged particles in a static GRMHD configuration obtained with the black hole accretion code (BHAC).

Research Organization:
Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO); European Research Council (ERC); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF); Research Foundation Flanders (FWO); Flemish Government
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0016542
OSTI ID:
1612632
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online), Vol. 240, Issue 2; ISSN 1538-4365
Publisher:
American Astronomical Society/IOPCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 19 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Quasi-harmonic oscillatory motion of charged particles around a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in a uniform magnetic field journal July 2015
Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in 3D Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Pair Plasma journal July 2017
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Structure-preserving second-order integration of relativistic charged particle trajectories in electromagnetic fields journal May 2017
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Event-horizon-scale structure in the supermassive black hole candidate at the Galactic Centre text January 2008
Very High Order $\PNM$ Schemes on Unstructured Meshes for the Resistive Relativistic MHD Equations text January 2009
Transition from Regular to Chaotic Circulation in Magnetized Coronae near Compact Objects text January 2010
Simulations of particle acceleration beyond the classical synchrotron burnoff limit in magnetic reconnection: An explanation of the Crab flares text January 2013
Inducing chaos by breaking axial symmetry in a black hole magnetosphere text January 2014
Formation of Hard Power-laws in the Energetic Particle Spectra Resulting from Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection text January 2014
Energy conserving schemes for the simulation of musical instrument contact dynamics text January 2015
General-relativistic resistive-magnetohydrodynamic simulations of binary neutron stars text January 2015
Quasi-harmonic oscillatory motion of charged particles around a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in an uniform magnetic field preprint January 2015
Ab-initio pulsar magnetosphere: the role of general relativity text January 2015
Acceleration of charged particles due to chaotic scattering in the combined black hole gravitational field and asymptotically uniform magnetic field text January 2015
Resolved Magnetic-Field Structure and Variability Near the Event Horizon of Sagittarius A* text January 2015
Exactly Energy Conserving Semi-Implicit Particle in Cell Formulation text January 2016
Circular orbits and related quasi-harmonic oscillatory motion of charged particles around weakly magnetized rotating black holes text January 2016
Radiative, two-temperature simulations of low luminosity black hole accretion flows in general relativity text January 2016
rHARM: Accretion and Ejection in Resistive GR-MHD text January 2016
Reconnection and particle acceleration in interacting flux ropes I. Magnetohydrodynamics and test particles in 2.5D text January 2016
Multiple scale kinetic simulations with the energy conserving semi implicit particle in cell (PIC) method text January 2016
Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in 3D Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Pair Plasma text January 2017
The Radiative Efficiency and Spectra of Slowly Accreting Black Holes from Two-Temperature GRRMHD Simulations text January 2017
Electron and proton heating in trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection text January 2017
RAPTOR I: Time-dependent radiative transfer in arbitrary spacetimes text January 2018
The role of electron heating physics in images and variability of the Galactic Centre black hole Sagittarius A* text January 2018
PolyPIC: the Polymorphic-Particle-in-Cell Method for Fluid-Kinetic Coupling text January 2018
First-Principles Plasma Simulations of Black-Hole Jet Launching text January 2018
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bhlight: General Relativistic Radiation Magnetohydrodynamics with Monte Carlo Transport preprint January 2015
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Cited By (6)

General-relativistic Resistive Magnetohydrodynamics with Robust Primitive-variable Recovery for Accretion Disk Simulations journal September 2019
Very-high-energy Emission from Magnetic Reconnection in the Radiative-inefficient Accretion Flow of SgrA* journal June 2019
The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project journal August 2019
The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project collection January 2019
A Novel Energy-conserving Scheme for Eight-dimensional Hamiltonian Problems journal December 2019
The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project text January 2019