  While the exact acceleration mechanism of energetic particles during solar
flares is (as yet) unknown, magnetic reconnection plays a key role both in the
release of stored magnetic energy of the solar corona and the magnetic
restructuring during a flare. Recent work has shown that special field lines,
called separators, are common sites of reconnection in 3D numerical
experiments. To date, 3D separator reconnection sites have received little
attention as particle accelerators. We investigate the effectiveness of
separator reconnection as a particle acceleration mechanism for electrons and
protons. We study the particle acceleration using a relativistic guiding-centre
particle code in a time-dependent kinematic model of magnetic reconnection at a
separator. The effect upon particle behaviour of initial position, pitch angle
and initial kinetic energy are examined in detail, both for specific (single)
particle examples and for large distributions of initial conditions. The
separator reconnection model contains several free parameters and we study the
effect of changing these parameters upon particle acceleration, in particular
in view of the final particle energy ranges which agree with observed energy
spectra.
