Related papers: Current Sheets and Collisionless Damping in Kineti…
We investigate the stability and nonlinear evolution of localized electron-scale current sheets using fully kinetic, electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations in two and three dimensions. By varying the current-sheet thickness, we…
Astrophysical current layers, e.g., in pulsar winds, can be electrically charged, while the plasma is charge-symmetric, $e^\pm$. Using PIC simulations, we investigate dynamics and plasmoid formation (tearing instability) in charged…
While dissipation in collisional plasma is defined in terms of viscosity and resistivity, the exact functional form of dissipation i.e., the so-called dissipation function in nearly collisionless plasma is unknown. Nevertheless, previous…
The differential heating of electrons and ions by turbulence in weakly collisional magnetized plasmas and the scales at which such energy dissipation is most effective are still debated. Using a large data sample measured in the Earth's…
The nonlinear collisional dynamics of coupled driven plasma waves in the presence of background dissipation is studied analytically within kinetic theory. Sufficiently near marginal stability, phase space correlations are poorly preserved…
The Earth's magnetosheath provides a high $\beta$ (ratio of electron thermal pressure to magnetic pressure) plasma environment where kinetic Alfv\'en waves (KAWs) strongly influence turbulence and energy dissipation. This study investigates…
We use existing 3D Discrete Element simulations of simple shear flows of spheres to evaluate the radial distribution function at contact that enables kinetic theory to correctly predict the pressure and the shear stress, for different…
Recent efforts to include kinetic effects in fluid simulations of plasmas have been very promising. Concerning collisionless magnetic reconnection, it has been found before that damping of the pressure tensor to isotropy leads to good…
The propagation of an electrostatic wave packet inside a collisionless and initially Maxwellian plasma is always dissipative because of the irreversible acceleration of the electrons by the wave. Then, in the linear regime, the wave packet…
Combined tearing-thermal evolution plays an important role in the disruption of current sheets, and formation of cool condensations within the solar atmosphere. However, this has received limited attention to date. We numerically explore a…
In situ measurements of kinetic scale current sheets in the solar wind show that they are often approximately force-free although the plasma beta is of order one. They frequently display systematic asymmetric and anti-correlated spatial…
An innovative field-particle correlation technique is proposed that uses single-point measurements of the electromagnetic fields and particle velocity distribution functions to investigate the net transfer of energy from fields to particles…
The Weibel/filamentation instability is known to play a key role in the physics of weakly magnetized collisionless shock waves. From the point of view of high energy astrophysics, this instability also plays a crucial role because its…
A specific set of dimensionless plasma and turbulence parameters is introduced to characterize the nature of turbulence and its dissipation in weakly collisional space and astrophysical plasmas. Key considerations are discussed for the…
Plasma turbulence plays a critical role in the transport of energy from large-scale magnetic fields and plasma flows to small scales, where the dissipated turbulent energy ultimately leads to heating of the plasma species. A major goal of…
Reconnection physics at micro-scales is investigated in an electron magnetohydrodynamics frame. A new process of collapse of the neutral current sheet is demonstrated by means of analytical and numerical solutions. It shows how at scales…
The rate of linear collisionless damping (Landau damping) in a classical electron gas confined to a heated ionized thin film is calculated. The general expression for the imaginary part of the dielectric tensor in terms of the parameters of…
Plasma turbulence is a ubiquitous dynamical process that transfers energy across many spatial and temporal scales and affects energetic particle transport. Recent advances in the understanding of compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD)…
Turbulence plays a key role for forming the complex geometry of the large-scale current sheet (CS) and fast energy release in a solar eruption. In this paper, we present full 3D high-resolution simulations for the process of a moderate…
We present a cascade model for turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas that follows the nonlinear cascade of energy from the large scales of driving in the MHD regime to the small scales of the kinetic Alfven wave regime where the…