Related papers: Firehose and Mirror Instabilities in a Collisionle…
Plasma flow and acceleration in a magnetic mirror configuration are studied using a drift-kinetic particles-in-cell model in the paraxial approximation, with an emphasis on finite temperature effects and energy transport. Energy conversion…
Measurements made with the Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that significant levels of compressive fluctuations exist in the inner heliosheath. Some studies have already been performed with respect to the mirror-mode instability in the…
Using a hybrid kinetic magnetohydrodynamic formalism incorporating the effects of pressure anisotropy, we simulate the evolution of a turbulent collisionless plasma in six different models covering the sub/super-sonic and…
We study the stability of shear flows in a fully ionized plasma. Kelvin-Helmholtz is a well known, macroscopic and ideal shear-driven instability. In sufficiently low density plasmas, also the microscopic Hall magneto-shear instability can…
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…
Macroscopic gas motions are widespread throughout the solar atmosphere and shearing motions couple to the non--ideal effects, destabilising low frequency fluctuations in the medium. The origin of this non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic…
An electron distribution with a temperature anisotropy T_par/T_perp > 1 can lead to the Electron Firehose instability (Here par and perp denote directions relative to the background magnetic field B_0). Since possible particle acceleration…
Microtearing modes have been widely reported as a tearing parity electron temperature gradient driven plasma instability, which leads to fine scale tearing of the magnetic flux surfaces thereby resulting in reconnection of magnetic field…
We study the linear stability of weakly magnetized differentially rotating plasmas in both collisionless kinetic theory and Braginskii's theory of collisional, magnetized plasmas. We focus on the very weakly magnetized limit that is…
I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally…
In low-collisionality plasmas, velocity-space instabilities are a key mechanism providing an effective collisionality for the plasma. We use particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to study the interplay between electron and ion-scale…
The large-scale dynamics of plasmas is well described within the framework of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). However, whenever the ion density of the plasma becomes sufficiently low, the Hall effect is likely to become important. The role of…
The turbulent amplification of cosmic magnetic fields depends upon the material properties of the host plasma. In many hot, dilute astrophysical systems, such as the intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters, the rarity of…
A new analytical nonmodal approach to investigate the plasma instabilities driven by the sheared current is presented and applied to the analysis of the linear evolution of the Simon-Hoh (S-H) instability of a plasma in the inhomogeneous…
The mirror mode evolving in collisionless magnetised high-temperature thermally anisotropic plasmas is shown to develop an interesting macro-state. Starting as a classical zero frequency ion fluid instability it saturates quasi-linearly at…
Nonlinear effects of the trapping of resonant particles by the combined action of the electric field and the magnetic mirror force is studied using a gyrokinetic description that includes the finite Larmor radius effects. A general…
By means of three dimensional high-resolution hybrid simulations we study the properties of the magnetic field spectral anisotropies near and beyond ion kinetic scales. By using both a Fourier analysis and a local analysis based on…
Wave properties and instabilities in a magnetized, anisotropic, collisionless, rarefied hot plasma in fluid approximation are studied, using the 16-moments set of the transport equations obtained from the Vlasov equations. These equations…
In the solar wind plasma an excess of kinetic temperature along the background magnetic field stimulates proton firehose modes to grow if the parallel plasma beta parameter is sufficiently high, i.e., $\beta_{p \parallel}\gtrsim 1$. This…
We present results from three-dimensional hybrid-kinetic simulations of Alfv\'enic turbulence in a high-beta, collisionless plasma. The key feature of such turbulence is the interplay between local wave--wave interactions between the…