Particle Acceleration in a Folded Current Sheet

Two-dimensional particle simulations of a relativistic Harris current sheet of pair (e ±) plasmas have demonstrated that the system is unstable to the rela-tivistic drift kink instability and that a new kind of acceleration process takes place in the deformed current sheet. This process contributes to the generation of non-thermal particles and contributes to the fast magnetic dissipation in the current sheet structure. The acceleration mechanism and a brief comparison with relativistic magnetic reconnection are presented.