Relativistic positron-electron-ion shear flows and application to gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

We present particle-in-cell simulation results of relativistic shear flows for hybrid positron–electron–ion plasmas and compare to those for pure e+e− and pure e− ion plasmas. Among the three types of relativistic shear flows, we find that only hybrid shear flow is able to energize the electrons to form a high-energy spectral peak plus a hard power law tail. Such electron spectra are needed to model the observational properties of gamma-ray bursts.