Magnetic reconnection and dissipation processes are in particular recognized to be very important in high-energy astrophysics. Such processes not only affect the global dynamics of the plasma in scenarios involving compact objects, but are also believed to account for the production of the high-energy emission. Magnetic-field–line reconnection has actually been already observed in the existing numerical simulations based upon ideal GRMHD. However, this can only be explained with purely numerical reasons due to the nonvanishing amount of numerical artificial resistivity inherent to every computer code. Only very recently have a few approaches been put forward to develop numerical schemes to handle relativistic plasma with physical resistivity, involving the formulation and solution of the resistive relativistic MHD equations [409, 204].
Another interesting area in which new results are likely to be found may come from the coupling of GRMHD codes with particle codes. While the former type of codes give a good description of the large-scale dynamic processes, the latter are particularly suited to capturing the radiative processes operative at a microphysical scale in highly-relativistic objects, whose correct modelling may help extract and interpret observational diagnostics. Monte Carlo methods are extremely powerful in such aspects, as recently shown in the context of GRBs by [141], who confirmed the generation of strong electromagnetic fields by a Weibel-like instability in collisionless shocks and demonstrated their macroscopic propagation. When suitably coupled to GRMHD codes, particle codes could use the motivated initial and boundary conditions supplied by the magneto-fluid model to perform local particle-in-cell simulations.
Finally, it is worth noting that in some situations it may suffice to solve the equations of
force-free electrodynamics as an alternative to solving the full set of GRMHD equations. In an
astrophysical context this approach, valid in the low inertia limit of MHD, has been considered by,
e.g., [203, 250] to model neutron star and black-hole magnetospheres. On the one hand, the force-free
equations of motion can also be cast as a set of conservation laws (amenable to be solved using the
same techniques as for the full GRMHD system) and may be easier to integrate in regions
where the rest-mass energy is much smaller than the magnetic energy density. On the other
hand, if the inertia of the plasma particles is not negligible, the force-free approximation is
inaccurate as it cannot capture the thermal energy evolution of the particles as well as their motion
along field lines. Finally, the question of the likelihood of this approach to hold within current
sheets, due to the tearing mode instability of magnetic field lines reconnection, should also be
investigated.
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