Left: schematic radial cut from R ~ 0.1 to ~50 AU presenting our scenario qualitatively. The disc is vertically stratified into a neutral mid-plane (blue; MRI-stable), where EPs arriving from above travel quasi-ballistically (CSDA-like) along near-vertical paths, and an ionised atmosphere (yellow; low-β_p MRI-active), where sub-Alfvénic turbulence (M_A < 1) triggers turbulent magnetic reconnection that injects EPs, which then stream downwards (black arrows). In the bottom left part, a patchy variant of the ionised atmospheric layer is sketched, with a lower covering area and possible lateral growth (black arrows). In the ionised turbulent layer, EP transport could be treated as stochastic. The inner star–disc interaction zone treated in Brunn et al. (2023, 2024) is indicated at R ≲ 0.3. Right: radial cut from R ~ 0.07 to ~600 AU displaying the disc chemical and turbulent structure used in this work based on the PRODIMO model. The top panel shows the total hydrogen number density, n_H,tot (colour), with vertical column-density contours N = 10¹⁵, 10¹⁹, 10²¹, 10²⁴ cm⁻² (dashed black). The dashed red line marks the ionised–atomic transition (H⁺/H) defining the border between the region where H⁺ dominates and the region where H dominates. Analogously, the dashed orange line delimits the atomic–molecular transition (H/H₂). The bottom panel displays the Alfvénic Mach number M_A ≡ v_turb/V_A (colour). The red curve traces M_A = 1. The sub-Alfvénic region (M_A < 1) identifies where fast, turbulence-enabled reconnection, and thus EP acceleration, is expected. The solid red lines delimit the region where EP are efficiently accelerated, i.e. to energy more than 10 MeV. The white region is the so-called ‘dead zone’, where MRI is inefficient (see criterion Eq. (A.1)), there is no turbulence, M_A is set to 0.