Related papers: Radiative and dynamic stability of a dilute plasma
Galaxy clusters are filled with hot, diffuse X-ray emitting plasma, with a stochastically tangled magnetic field whose energy is close to equipartition with the energy of the turbulent motions \cite{zweibel1997, Vacca}. In the cluster…
In clusters of galaxies, the specific entropy of intracluster plasma increases outwards. Nevertheless, a number of recent studies have shown that the intracluster medium is subject to buoyancy instabilities due to the effects of cosmic rays…
Cold ($T\sim 10^{4} \ \mathrm{K}$) gas is very commonly found in both galactic and cluster halos. There is no clear consensus on its origin. Such gas could be uplifted from the central galaxy by galactic or AGN winds. Alternatively, it…
Cold fronts (CFs) - density and temperature plasma discontinuities - are ubiquitous in cool cores of galaxy clusters, where they appear as X-ray brightness edges in the intracluster medium, nearly concentric with the cluster center. We…
In galaxy clusters, the hot intracluster medium (ICM) can develop a striking multi-phase structure around the brightest cluster galaxy. Much work has been done on understanding the origin of this central nebula, but less work has studied…
Magnetic reconnection can develop spontaneously via the tearing instability, often invoked to explain disruptive instabilities in fusion devices, solar flares, the generation of periodic density disturbances at the tip of helmet streamers,…
The dynamics of the oscillator system is investigated. The conditions under which this dynamics becomes unstable are determined. In particular, it is shown that plasma in constant magnetic field becomes unstable if its density exceeds a…
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…
(abridged) The ICM has been suggested to be buoyantly unstable in the presence of magnetic field and anisotropic thermal conduction. We perform first cosmological simulations of galaxy cluster formation that simultaneously include magnetic…
We model the intracluster medium as a weakly collisional plasma that is a binary mixture of the hydrogen and the helium ions, along with free electrons. When, owing to the helium sedimentation, the gradient of the mean molecular weight (or…
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…
We discuss hydrostatic models of galaxy clusters in which heat diffusion balances radiative cooling. We consider two different sources of diffusion, thermal conduction and turbulent mixing, parameterized by dimensionless coefficients, f and…
We use three-dimensional MHD simulations with anisotropic thermal conduction to study turbulence due to the magnetothermal instability (MTI) in the intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters. The MTI grows on timescales of ~1 Gyr and is…
Local thermal instability can plausibly explain the formation of multiphase gas in many different astrophysical environments, but the theory is only well understood in the optically thin limit of the equations of radiation hydrodynamics…
Using a linear stability analysis and two and three-dimensional nonlinear simulations, we study the physics of buoyancy instabilities in a combined thermal and relativistic (cosmic ray) plasma, motivated by the application to clusters of…
In two previous publications$^{1,2}$, we have demonstrated that stationary rotation of magnetized plasma about a compact central object permits an enormous number of different MHD instabilities, with the well-known magneto-rotational…
Slow dynamical changes in magnetic-field strength and invariance of the particles' magnetic moments generate ubiquitous pressure anisotropies in weakly collisional, magnetized astrophysical plasmas. This renders them unstable to fast,…
At kinetic scales in the solar wind, instabilities transfer energy from particles to fluctuations in the electromagnetic fields while restoring plasma conditions towards thermodynamic equilibrium. We investigate the interplay between…
In weakly-collisional plasmas such as the intracluster medium (ICM), heat and momentum transport become anisotropic with respect to the local magnetic field direction. Anisotropic heat conduction causes the slow magnetosonic wave to become…
The stability of charged particle motion in a uniform magnetic field with an added spatially uniform transverse rotating magnetic field (RMF) is studied analytically. It is found that the stability diagram of a single-particle's orbit…