Related papers: Physics of collisionless phase mixing
Particle acceleration in collisionless plasma systems is a central question in astroplasma and astroparticle physics. The structure of the acceleration regions, electron-ion energy equilibration, preacceleration of particles at shocks to…
We investigate the acceleration of light particles in perpendicular shocks for plasmas consisting of a mixture of leptonic and hadronic particles. Starting from the full set of conservation equations for the mixed plasma constituents, we…
Various systems can be modeled as a point-like explosion of ionized debris into a magnetized, collisionless background plasma -- including astrophysical examples, active experiments in space, and laser-driven laboratory experiments. Debris…
We present the first laboratory observations of time-resolved electron and ion velocity distributions in forming, magnetized collisionless shocks. Thomson scattering of a probe laser beam was used to observe the interaction of a…
Microinstabilities play important roles in both entropy generation and particle acceleration in collisionless shocks. Recent studies have suggested that in the transition zone of quasi-perpendicular ($Q_{\perp}$) shocks in the high-beta…
We present first principles simulations of the direct collisionless coupling of the free energy of fusion-born ions into electron current in a magnetically confined fusion plasma. These simulations demonstrate, for the first time, a key…
A robust method to handle vacuum and near vacuum regions in hybrid simulations for space and astrophysical plasmas is presented. The conventional hybrid simulation model dealing with kinetic ions and a massless charge-neutralizing electron…
We study processes at the transition region between hot (rare) and cold (dense) plasma in the collisionless regime. We use a 3-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (3-D PIC) relativistic code. Motivated by the transition region in…
The evolution of non-potential perturbations to a current-free magnetic X-point configuration is studied, taking into account electron inertial effects as well as resistivity. Electron inertia is shown to have a negligible effect on the…
In the innermost regions of low-luminosity accretion flows, including Sgr A* at the center of our Galaxy, the frequency of Coulomb collisions is so low that the plasma is two-temperature, with the ions substantially hotter than the…
We study with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations the stability of fast magnetosonic shocks. They expand across a collisionless plasma and an orthogonal magnetic field that is aligned with one of the directions resolved by the 2D…
We study the collision frequencies of charged particles in the complex plasmas with the non-Maxwellian velocity distributions. The average collision frequencies of electron-ion, electron-electron and ion-ion are derived in the two-parameter…
Collisionless shocks generated by two colliding relativistic electron-positron plasma shells are studied using particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Shocks are mediated by the Weibel instability (WI), and the kinetic energy of the fastest…
We perform 3D3V hybrid-Vlasov simulations of turbulence with quasi-isotropic, compressible injection near ion scales to mimic the Earth's magnetosheath plasma, and investigate the novel electron-only reconnection, recently observed by the…
After introduction we focus on: the transport of charged particles, the acceleration of ions at shocks, and the acceleration of electrons at shocks. Chapter 2 studies the propagation of solar energetic particles(SEPs) in turbulent magnetic…
We perform extensive 2D Particle-In-Cell (PIC) electromagnetic simulations of low pressure Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) discharges with various coil current and driving frequencies. Our simulations show that in low-frequency cases,…
Magnetic reconnection (MR) in collisionless plasma is often attributed to the off-diagonal electron Reynolds stress, which can give rise to a large induction electric field in the reconnection region. However, in magneto-hydro-dynamics…
A pair of nonlinear diffusion equations in Fourier space} is used to study the dynamics of strong Alfv\'en-wave turbulence, from MHD to electron scales. Special attention is paid to the regime of imbalance between the energies of…
We study diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) of protons and electrons at nonrelativistic, high Mach number, quasiparallel, collisionless shocks by means of self-consistent 1D particle-in-cell simulations. For the first time, both species are…
The evolutionarity conditions for the MHD shock waves are considered within the framework of the 8-moment approximation for collisionless plasma with heat fluxes. In the general case, evolutionarity diagrams are obtained depending on the…