The Morphology and Dynamics of Relativistic Jets with Relativistic Equation of State

Abstract

We study the effect of plasma composition on the dynamics and morphology of relativistic astrophysical jets. Our work is based on a relativistic total variation diminishing simulation code. We use a relativistic equation of state in the simulation code that accounts for the thermodynamics of a multispecies plasma, which is a mixture of electrons, positrons, and protons. To study the effect of plasma composition, we consider various jet models. These models are characterized by the same injection parameters, same jet kinetic luminosity, and the same Mach numbers. The evolution of these models shows that the plasma composition affects the propagation speed of the jet head, the structure of the jet head, and the morphology, despite fixing the initial parameters. We conclude that electron-positron jets are the slowest and show more pronounced turbulent structures in comparison to other plasma compositions. The area and locations of the hot-spots also depend on the composition of the jet plasma. Our results also show that boosting mechanisms are an important aspect of multi-dimensional simulations, which are also influenced by the change in composition.

Keywords

• Relativistic jets
• Relativistic fluid dynamics