Related papers: A thermally stable heating mechanism for the intra…
The relationship between a decaying strong turbulence and the mirror instability in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using two-dimensional hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic field perpendicular…
Turbulence in the weakly collisional intracluster medium of galaxies (ICM) is able to generate strong thermal velocity anisotropies in the ions (with respect to the local magnetic field direction), if the magnetic moment of the particles is…
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…
In the intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters, heat and momentum are transported almost entirely along (but not across) magnetic field lines. We perform the first fully self-consistent Braginskii-MHD simulations of galaxy clusters…
We propose that pressure anisotropy causes weakly collisional turbulent plasmas to self-organize so as to resist changes in magnetic-field strength. We term this effect "magneto-immutability" by analogy with incompressibility (resistance to…
It is now widely accepted that heating processes play a fundamental role in galaxy clusters, struggling in an intricate but fascinating `dance' with its antagonist, radiative cooling. Last generation observations, especially X-ray, are…
In the hot intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters, plasma microinstabilities may play an important role in the transport of heat and momentum on the large scales. In this paper, we continue our investigation of the effect of whistler…
In the absence of efficient collisions, deviations from thermal equilibrium of plasma particle distributions are controlled by the self-generated instabilities. The whistler instability is a notorious example, usually responsible for the…
The assumption of a spatially uniform helium distribution in the intracluster medium can lead to biases in the estimates of key cluster parameters if composition gradients are present. The helium concentration profile in galaxy clusters is…
In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified from a condition on entropy to a condition on…
The physics of the intracluster medium, in particular the values for the thermal conductivity and the viscosity are largely unknown and subject to an ongoing debate. Here, we study the effect of viscosity on the thermal state of the…
It is generally argued that most clusters of galaxies host cooling flows in which radiative cooling in the centre causes a slow inflow. However, recent observations by Chandra and XMM conflict with the predicted cooling flow rates. Amongst…
This paper describes how active galactic nuclei can heat galaxy-cluster plasmas by driving convection in the intracluster medium. A model is proposed in which a central supermassive black hole accretes intracluster plasma at the Bondi rate…
Understanding turbulence within the Intracluster Medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters is pivotal for comprehending their evolution and dynamics. Employing 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of galaxy cluster mergers, we examine the…
The intracluster medium (ICM) is the low-density diffuse magnetized plasma in galaxy clusters, which reaches virial temperatures of up to 10^8 K. Under these conditions, the plasma is weakly collisional and therefore has an anisotropic…
In low-collisionality plasmas, anisotropic heat conduction due to a magnetic field leads to buoyancy instabilities for any nonzero temperature gradient. We study analogous instabilities in degenerate {\it collisional} plasmas, i.e., when…
We present results from numerical simulations of the cooling-core cluster A2199 produced by the two-dimensional (2-D) resistive magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) code MACH2. In our simulations we explore the effect of anisotropic thermal…
The dynamics of weakly magnetized collisionless plasmas in the presence of an imposed temperature gradient along an ambient magnetic field is explored with particle-in-cell simulations and modeling. Two thermal reservoirs at different…
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…
Evidence for inhomogeneous heating in the interplanetary plasma near current sheets dynamically generated by magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is obtained using measurements from the ACE spacecraft. These coherent structures only…