Shocks, Reconnection, and Particle Acceleration in Plasma-fluids

Centre Blaise Pascal, ENS-Lyon, France
June 20-21, 2013
Website of the workshop

Organizing committee:

• Rolf Walder, CRAL, École normale supérieure de Lyon
• Alexandre Marcowith, LUPM, Laboratoire Univers et Particules, Université Montpellier 2, France
• Andrei Bykov, Ioffe Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Christophe Winisdoerffer, CRAL, École normale supérieure de Lyon, France
• Mickaël Melzani, CRAL, École normale supérieure de Lyon, France

Administrative coordination:

• Samantha Barendson, CBP, ENS de Lyon, France (samantha.barendson @ ens-lyon.fr)

The workshop is supported by:

• Centre Blaise Pascal
• FLMSN
• CRAL

The acceleration of non-thermal particles in large scale flows is of prime importance in astrophysics and beyond. Cosmic accelerators can energize particles up to 10²⁰ eV. The flux of high-energy cosmic rays has a strong impact on Earth, on its climate and weather.

However, accelerators embedded in large scale MHD flows within astrophysical objects still remain enigmatic in various ways. The aim of the workshop is to bring together people of different communities and approaches: modelers of large scale flows, scientists scrutinizing fundamental processes, people who are deriving observable signatures, and numerical specialists. We also aim at bringing together the French with the European community and strengthen the collaboration between them, specially emphasizing the Rhône-Alpes region.

The first day concentrates on theoretical questions of plasma physics, particle acceleration, magnetic reconnection, and turbulence in plasma fluids. This includes open questions of how to model these phenomena and how to realize such models numerically.

The second day presents results of modeling concrete astrophysical objects: microquasars and X-ray binaries, pulsars and their winds, gamma-ray bursts, solar wind, supernova remnants and superbubbles, the interstellar medium.