Speaker
Description
Flaring in blazar jets has been found to occur at TeV energies on rapid timescales as short as minutes, implying the emission originates from a very compact region within the jet. Whilst the physical origin powering such flares is yet to be established, recent particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations have indicated that magnetic reconnection can plausibly produce plasmoids small enough to potentially power such flares. PIC methods are numerically robust, but difficult to scale up to the sizes likely needed to accurately model the environment within an astrophysical relativistic jet. I present work so far on a macroscopic reconnection model in which a spherical plasmoid is grown by merging with other plasmoids, and particle acceleration is undertaken by numerically solving the diffusion-loss equation. Radiative losses from synchrotron and synchrotron self-Compton are explicitly computed, producing flare profiles, timescales and allowing the modelling of the Spectral Energy Distribution. Preliminary results indicate that it is difficult to grow a plasmoid which is able to match observed TeV flaring profiles without simultaneously producing huge X-ray and optical flares, which have not been observed.
