Related papers: Demagnetized Electron Heating at Collisionless Sho…
Ultraviolet spectroscopy of the extended solar corona is a powerful tool for measuring the properties of protons, electrons, and heavy ions in the accelerating solar wind. The large coronal holes that expand up from the north and south…
Warming in complex physical systems, in particular global warming, attracts significant contemporary interest. It is essential, therefore, to understand basic physical mechanisms leading to overheating. It is well known that application of…
We study the physics of electron acceleration at collisionless shocks that move through a plasma containing large-scale magnetic fluctuations. We numerically integrate the trajectories of a large number of electrons, which are treated as…
Perihelion passes on Parker Solar Probe orbits six through nine have been studied to show that solar wind core electrons emerged from 15 solar radii with a temperature of 55 plus or minus 5 eV, independent of the solar wind speed which…
Plasmas in Earth's outer magnetosphere, magnetosheath, and solar wind are essentially collisionless. This means particle distributions are not typically in thermodynamic equilibrium and deviate significantly from Maxwellian distributions.…
Magnetic reconnection and associated heating of ions and electrons in strongly magnetised, weakly collisional plasmas are studied by means of gyrokinetic simulations. It is shown that an appreciable amount of the released magnetic energy is…
The linear thermoelectric properties of molecular junctions are theoretically studied close to room temperature within a model including electron-electron and electron-vibration interactions on the molecule. A nonequilibrium adiabatic…
Electron heating and mixing during asymmetric reconnection are studied with a 3D kinetic simulation that matches plasma parameters from Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft observations of a magnetopause diffusion region. The mixing…
We investigate the form of the momentum distribution function for protons and electrons in an advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF). We show that for all accretion rates, Coulomb collisions are too inefficient to thermalize the protons.…
This work discusses the origin of temperature rise during the collision welding process. The different physical irreversible and reversible mechanisms which act as heat sources are described: isentropic compression work, shock dissipation,…
We couple a proximity Josephson junction to a Joule-heated normal metal film and measure its electron temperature under steady state and nonequilibrium conditions. With a timed sequence of heating and temperature probing pulses, we are able…
Electron acceleration to non-thermal energies is known to occur in low Mach number (M<5) shocks in galaxy clusters and solar flares, but the electron acceleration mechanism remains poorly understood. Using two-dimensional (2D)…
A leading explanation for the origin of Galactic cosmic rays is acceleration at high-Mach number shock waves in the collisionless plasma surrounding young supernova remnants. Evidence for this is provided by multi-wavelength non-thermal…
Using observations of Earth's bow shock by the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, we show for the first time that active magnetic reconnection is occurring at current sheets embedded within the quasi-parallel shock's transition layer. We…
Shock waves propagating in collisionless heliospheric and astrophysical plasmas have been studied extensively over the decades. One prime motivation is to understand the nonthermal particle acceleration at shocks. Although the theory of…
We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally two limiting factors in cooling electrons using biased tunnel junctions to extract heat from a normal metal into a superconductor. Firstly, when the injection rate of electrons exceeds…
We propose an adiabatic magnetization process for cooling the Fermi electron gas to ultra-low temperatures as an alternative to the known adiabatic demagnetization mechanism. We show via a new adiabatic equation that at the constant density…
Electrons in shocks are efficiently energized due to the cross-shock potential, which develops because of differential deflection of electrons and ions by the magnetic field in the shock front. The electron energization is necessarily…
Both analytical and numerical works show that magnetic reconnection must occur in hot accretion flows. This process will effectively heat and accelerate electrons. In this paper we use the numerical hybrid simulation of magnetic…
Several studies in the near-Earth environment show that intermittent structures are important sites of energy dissipation and particle energization. Recent Parker Solar Probe (PSP) data, sampled in the near-Sun environment, have shown that…