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Magnetic reconnection is a leading mechanism for dissipating magnetic energyand accelerating nonthermal particles in Poynting-flux dominated flows. In thisletter, we investigate nonthermal particle acceleration during magneticreconnection in a magnetically-dominated ion-electron plasma using fullykinetic simulations. For an ion-electron plasma with the total magnetization$\sigma_0=B^2/(4\pi n(m_i+m_e)c^2)$, the magnetization for each species is$\sigma_i \sim \sigma_0$ and $\sigma_e \sim (m_i/m_e) \sigma_0$, respectively.We have studied the magnetically dominated regime by varying $\sigma_{e} = 10^3- 10^5$ with initial ion and electron temperatures $T_i = T_e = 5 - 20 m_ec^2$and mass ratio $m_i/m_e = 1 - 1836$. The results demonstrate that reconnectionquickly establishes power-law energy distributions for both electrons and ionswithin several ($2-3$) light-crossing times. For the cases with periodicboundary conditions, the power-law index is $1<s<2$ for both electrons andions. The hard spectra limit the power-law energies for electrons and ions tobe $\gamma_{be} \sim \sigma_e$ and $\gamma_{bi} \sim \sigma_i$, respectively.The main acceleration mechanism is a Fermi-like acceleration through the driftmotions of charged particles. When comparing the spectra for electrons and ionsin momentum space, the spectral indices $s_p$ are identical as predicted inFermi acceleration. We also find that the bulk flow can carry a significantamount of energy during the simulations. We discuss the implication of thisstudy in the context of Poynting-flux dominated jets and pulsar windsespecially the applications for explaining the nonthermal high-energyemissions.

Efficient Production of High-energy Nonthermal Particles during Magnetic Reconnection in a Magnetically-dominated Ion-Electron Plasma