Polarization Phenomena by Deuteron Fragmentation into Pions

The fragmentation of deuterons into pions emitted forward in the kinematic region forbidden for free nucleon-nucleon collisions is analyzed. The inclusive relativistic invariant spectrum of pions and the tensor analyzing power T_{20} are investigated within the framework of an impulse approximation using different kinds of the deuteron wave function. The influence of P-wave inclusion in the deuteron wave function is studied, too. The invariant spectrum is shown to be more sensitive to the amplitude of the $NN \to \pi X$ process than the tensor analyzing power T_{20}. It is shown that the inclusion of the non-nucleon degrees of freedom in a deuteron results a satisfactory description of experimental data about the inclusive pion spectrum and improves the description of data about T_{20}. According to the experimental data, T_{20} has the positive sign and very small values, less than 0.2, what contradicts to the theoretical calculations ignoring these degrees of freedom.Comment: 18 pages, 8 eps figures, 1 picture - svjour.cls required; enlarged new version with corrections and additional figure. The Abstract and the section "Summary and outlook" have been also corrected. Final version to appear in Eur.Phys.J. A. A talk given at the International Workshop "Symmetries and Spin" (July 17-22, Prague, Czech Republic

Solar Particle Acceleration at Reconnecting 3D Null Points

Context: The strong electric fields associated with magnetic reconnection in solar flares are a plausible mechanism to accelerate populations of high energy, non-thermal particles. One such reconnection scenario occurs at a 3D magnetic null point, where global plasma flows give rise to strong currents in the spine axis or fan plane. Aims: To understand the mechanism of charged particle energy gain in both the external drift region and the diffusion region associated with 3D magnetic reconnection. In doing so we evaluate the efficiency of resistive spine and fan models for particle acceleration, and find possible observables for each. Method: We use a full orbit test particle approach to study proton trajectories within electromagnetic fields that are exact solutions to the steady and incompressible magnetohydrodynamic equations. We study single particle trajectories and find energy spectra from many particle simulations. The scaling properties of the accelerated particles with respect to field and plasma parameters is investigated. Results: For fan reconnection, strong non-uniform electric drift streamlines can accelerate the bulk of the test particles. The highest energy gain is for particles that enter the current sheet, where an increasing "guide field" stabilises particles against ejection. The energy is only limited by the total electric potential energy difference across the fan current sheet. The spine model has both slow external electric drift speed and weak energy gain for particles reaching the current sheet. Conclusions: The electromagnetic fields of fan reconnection can accelerate protons to the high energies observed in solar flares, gaining up to 0.1 GeV for anomalous values of resistivity. However, the spine model, which gave a harder energy spectrum in the ideal case, is not an efficient accelerator after pressure constraints in the resistive model are included.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysic