Related papers: Buoyancy Instabilities in Weakly Magnetized Low Co…
Weakly collisional space plasmas are rarely in local thermal equilibrium and often exhibit non-Maxwellian electron and ion velocity distributions that lead to the growth of microinstabilities, that is, enhanced electric and magnetic fields…
It is pointed out that electron thermal fluctuations can couple with the ion acoustic mode in an inhomogeneous plasma to generate a low frequency ion time scale electromagnetic wave. This electromagnetic wave can become unstable if the…
How thermal equilibrium is determined in a weakly collisional plasma is a fundamental question in plasma physics. This letter shows that the turbulence driven by the magnetic curvature and density gradient tends to equilibrate the…
The Weibel instability could be responsible for the generation of magnetic fields in various objects such as gamma-ray bursts, jets from active galactic nuclei, and clusters of galaxies. Using numerical simulations, the development of the…
The maximum magnetic field strength generated by Weibel-type plasma instabilities is estimated for typical conditions in the interstellar medium. The relevant kinetic dispersion relations are evaluated by conducting a parameter study both…
Differentially rotating plasma disks, around compact objects, that are imbedded in a ``seed'' magnetic field are shown to develop vertically localized ballooning modes that are driven by the combined radial gradient of the rotation…
Recent observations revealed that the solar atmosphere is highly structured in density, temperature and magnetic field. The presence of these gradients may lead to the appearance of currents in the plasma, which in the weakly collisional…
We present the first observation of instability in weakly magnetized, pressure dominated plasma Couette flow firmly in the Hall regime. Strong Hall currents couple to a low frequency electromagnetic mode that is driven by high-$\beta$…
In space plasmas kinetic instabilities are driven by the beaming (drifting) components and/or the temperature anisotropy of charged particles. The heat-flux instabilities are known in the literature as electromagnetic modes destabilized by…
We present results from the first 3D kinetic numerical simulation of magnetorotational turbulence and dynamo, using the local shearing-box model of a collisionless accretion disc. The kinetic magnetorotational instability grows from a…
We use the machinery usually employed for studying the onset of Rayleigh--B\'enard convection in hydro- and magnetohydro-dynamic settings to address the onset of convection induced by the magnetothermal instability and the…
Numerous prior studies have shown that as proton beta increases, a narrower range of proton temperature anisotropy values is observed. This effect has often been ascribed to the actions of kinetic microinstabilities because the distribution…
The thermal stability of rotating, stratified, unmagnetized atmospheres is studied by means of linear-perturbation analysis, finding stability, overstability or instability, depending on the properties of the gas distribution, but also on…
We review recent results on the nonlinear development of thermal instability in the context of the turbulent atomic interstellar medium (ISM). First, we pre- sent a brief summary of the linear theory, remarking that, in the atomic ISM, the…
We consider the linear axisymmetric stability of a differentially rotating collisionless plasma in the presence of a weak magnetic field; we restrict our analysis to wavelengths much larger than the proton Larmor radius. This is the kinetic…
The drift-Alfven instabilities in the magnetic field aligned (parallel) sheared flow of a finite beta plasma with comparable inhomogeneous ion temperature and homogeneous electron temperature are examined. The development of instabilities…
We perform a linear magnetohydrodynamic perturbation analysis for a stratified magnetized envelope where the diffusion of heat is mediated by charged particles that are confined to flow along magnetic field lines. We identify an…
When the ion mean free path much exceeds the Larmor radius in a plasma, the viscous stress tensor is altered dramatically, and depends only upon quantities measured along the field lines. This regime corresponds to typical interstellar…
Observational evidence in space and astrophysical plasmas with long collisional mean free path suggests that more massive charged particles may be preferentially heated. One possible mechanism for this is the turbulent cascade of energy…
A nonresonant cosmic-ray-current-driven instability may operate in the shock precursors of young supernova remnants and be responsible for magnetic-field amplification, plasma heating and turbulence. Earlier simulations demonstrated…