Related papers: Dissipation in intercluster plasma
Dynamics of inelastic gases are studied within the framework of random collision processes. The corresponding Boltzmann equation with uniform collision rates is solved analytically for gases, impurities, and mixtures. Generally, the energy…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in plasmas, leading to rich dynamics characterized by irregularity, irreversibility, energy fluctuations across many scales, and energy transfer across many scales. Another fundamental and generic feature of…
The distribution of Helium in the intracluster medium (ICM) permeating galaxy clusters is not well constrained due to the very high plasma temperature. Therefore, the plasma is often assumed to be homogeneous. A non-uniform Helium…
I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally…
Thermal instability is one of the most important processes in the formation of clumpy substructure in magnetic molecular clouds. On the other hand, ambipolar diffusion, or ion-neutral friction, has long been thought to be an important…
(Abridged) We describe the cascade of plasma waves or turbulence injected, presumably by reconnection, at scales comparable to the size of a solar flare loop to scales comparable to particle gyroradii, and evaluate their damping by various…
In galaxy clusters the entropy distribution of the IntraCluster Plasma modulates the latter's equilibrium within the Dark Matter gravitational wells, as rendered by our Supermodel. We argue the entropy production at the boundary shocks to…
Wave properties and instabilities in a magnetized, anisotropic, collisionless, rarefied hot plasma in fluid approximation are studied, using the 16-moments set of the transport equations obtained from the Vlasov equations. These equations…
The circumgalactic medium (CGM) is responsive to kinetic disruptions generated by nearby astrophysical events. In this work, we study the saturation and dissipation of turbulent hydrodynamics within the CGM through an extensive array of 252…
Collisionless dissipation of macroscopic energy into heat is an unsolved problem of space and astrophysical plasmas, e.g., solar wind and Earth's magnetosheath. The most viable process under consideration is the turbulent-cascade of…
The usual theory of plasma relaxation, based on the selective decay of magnetic energy over the (global) magnetic helicity, predicts a force-free state for a plasma. Such a force-free state is inadequate to describe most realistic plasma…
We investigate a non-equilibrium ionization state and an electron-ion two-temperature structure of the intracluster medium (ICM) in merging galaxy clusters using a series of N-body and hydrodynamic simulations. Mergers with various sets of…
(Abridged) The thermal history of the intracluster medium (ICM) is complex. Heat input from cluster mergers, AGN, and galaxy winds offsets and may even halt the cooling of the ICM. Consequently, the processes that set the properties of the…
Galaxy cluster mergers drive powerful shock fronts that heat the intracluster medium (ICM) and accelerate particles, redistributing the energy in a merger. A665 is one of only a few clusters with such a powerful shock ($\mathcal{M}\sim$3),…
Turbulent heating may play an important role in galaxy-cluster plasmas, but if turbulent heating is to balance radiative cooling in a quasi-steady state, some mechanism must set the turbulent velocity to the required value. This paper…
In the outskirts of the intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters, the temperature decreases with radius. Due to the weakly collisional nature of the plasma, these regions are susceptible to the magneto-thermal instability (MTI), which…
Self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) has been proposed to solve small-scale problems in $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. In previous work, constraints on the self-interaction cross-section of dark matter have been derived assuming that the…
The evolution of Alfven turbulence due to three-wave interactions is discussed using kinetic theory for a collisionless, thermal plasma. There are three low-frequency modes, analogous to the three modes of compressible MHD. When only Alfven…
Turbulence is a predominant process for energizing electrons and ions in collisionless astrophysical plasmas, and thus is responsible for shaping their radiative signatures (luminosity, spectra, and variability). To better understand the…
Plasma instabilities can be encountered in many branches of physics. This work focuses on relativistic plasmas with applications in theoretical astrophysics and particle accelerator physics. Even though these fields seem to be unrelated the…