Related papers: GRB: magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and emission fr…
Shock acceleration is an ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysical plasmas. Plasma waves and their associated instabilities (e.g., the Buneman instability, two-streaming instability, and the Weibel instability) created in the shocks are…
We present results from two-dimensional numerical simulations of a supersonic turbulent flow in the plane of the galactic disk, incorporating shear, thresholded and discrete star formation (SF), self-gravity, rotation and magnetic fields. A…
A pair of curved shocks in a collisionless plasma is examined with a two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The shocks are created by the collision of two electron-ion clouds at a speed that exceeds everywhere the threshold…
Collisionless, magnetized turbulence offers a promising framework for the generation of non-thermal high-energy particles in various astrophysical sites. Yet, the detailed mechanism that governs particle acceleration has remained subject to…
We review recent progress on collisionless relativistic shocks. Kinetic instability theory is briefed including its predictions and limitations. The main focus is on numerical experiments in (i) pair and (ii) electron-nucleon plasmas. The…
Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of primordial star formation suggest that the gas within the first star-forming halos is turbulent. This has strong implications on the subsequent evolution, in particular on the generation of…
The magnetic quadrupole structure formation during the interaction of two ultra-short high power laser pulses with a collisionless plasma is demonstrated with 2.5-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. The subsequent expansion of the…
Electron and proton acceleration in three-dimensional electric and magnetic fields is studied through test particle simulations. The fields are obtained by a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation of magnetic reconnection in slab…
Magnetic field configurations extending over macroscopic scale distances are shown to be generated in rarefied collisionless plasmas when non-thermal and spatially inhomogeneous electron distributions in phase space emerge. The analyzed…
Magnetic fields are generated in ionized objects rotating with respect to a radiation background. Based on conservation of canonical ion momentum, it has been previously suggested that even if the radiation intensity is unrestricted the…
Observations of gamma-ray burst afterglows suggest that the correlation length of magnetic field fluctuations downstream of relativistic non-magnetized collisionless shocks grows with distance from the shock to scales much larger than the…
The amplification and maintenance of the observed magnetic fields in the ICM are usually attributed to the turbulent dynamo action. This is generally derived employing a collisional MHD model. However, in the ICM the ion mean free path…
The underlying concepts of collisionless magnetic field reconnection in the vicinity of the diffusion regions are developed qualitatively from first principles. One conclusion of this analysis is that energetic ions and electrons observed…
Magnetic reconnection is a process that converts magnetic energy into plasma energy by changing the magnetic field line topology. The outstanding question is why the reconnection rate is $\mathcal{O}(0.01 - 0.1)$ in many astrophysical…
We show that, under Braginskii magneto-hydrodynamics, anti-parallel gradients in average ion charge state and electron temperature can be unstable to the growth of self-generated magnetic fields. The instability is analogous to the…
Spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance compatible with observational limits may realistically take place in the context of string theories, possibly endowing the photon with a mass. In this process the conformal symmetry of the…
The radiation from afterglows of gamma-ray bursts is generated in the collisionless plasma shock interface between a relativistic outflow and a quiescent circum-burst medium. The two main ingredients responsible for the radiation are…
Determining the physical mechanisms that extract energy from turbulent fluctuations in weakly collisional magnetized plasmas is necessary for a more complete characterization of the behavior of a variety of space and astrophysical plasmas.…
The generation of primordial magnetic seed fields during inflation is studied in a theory derived from the one-loop vacuum polarization effective action of the photon in a curved background. This includes terms which couple the curvature to…
The generation of large-scale magnetic fields is studied in dilaton electromagnetism in noncommutative inflationary cosmology taking into account the effects of the spacetime uncertainty principle motivated by string theory. We show that it…