Related papers: Solar wind collisional heating
A likely candidate mechanism to heat the solar corona and solar wind is low-frequency "Alfv\'enic" turbulence sourced by magnetic fluctuations near the solar surface. Depending on its properties, such turbulence can heat different species…
This article is devoted to the long-time dynamics of point-vortex type systems near thermal equilibrium and to the possible emergence of collisional relaxation. More precisely, we consider a tagged particle coupled to a large number of…
Weakly collisional and collisionless plasmas are typically far from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), and understanding energy conversion in such systems is a forefront research problem. The standard approach is to investigate changes…
Kinetic Alfven wave turbulence in solar wind is considered and it is shown that non-Maxwellian electron distribution function has a significant effect on the dynamics of the solar wind plasmas. Linear Landau damping leads to the formation…
Impulsive solar energetic electrons are often observed in the interplanetary space near the Earth and have an attractive diagnostic potential for poorly understood solar flare acceleration processes. We investigate the transport of solar…
How thermal equilibrium is determined in a weakly collisional plasma is a fundamental question in plasma physics. This letter shows that the turbulence driven by the magnetic curvature and density gradient tends to equilibrate the…
Does overall thermal equilibrium exist between ions and electrons in a weakly collisional, magnetised, turbulent plasma---and, if not, how is thermal energy partitioned between ions and electrons? This is a fundamental question in plasma…
Determining the physical mechanisms that extract energy from turbulent fluctuations in weakly collisional magnetized plasmas is necessary for a more complete characterization of the behavior of a variety of space and astrophysical plasmas.…
We study the damping of collisionless Alfv\'enic turbulence by two mechanisms: stochastic heating (whose efficiency depends on the local turbulence amplitude $\delta z_\lambda$) and linear Landau damping (whose efficiency is independent of…
We perform a high-resolution two-dimensional fully-kinetic numerical simulation of a turbulent plasma system with observation-driven conditions, in order to investigate the interplay between turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and particle…
How turbulent energy is dissipated in weakly collisional space and astrophysical plasmas is a major open question. Here, we present the application of a field-particle correlation technique to directly measure the transfer of energy between…
The evolution of the electron heat flux in the solar wind is regulated by the interplay between several effects: solar wind expansion, that can potentially drive velocity-space instabilties, turbulence and wave-particle interactions, and,…
Magnetohydronamic turbulence is believed to play a crucial role in heating the laboratorial, space, and astrophysical plasmas. However, the precise connection between the turbulent fluctuations and the particle kinetics has not yet been…
In this article, we study the physics of charged particle energization inside a strongly turbulent plasma, where current sheets naturally appear in evolving large-scale magnetic topologies, but they are split into two populations of…
Minor ions in the solar corona are heated to extreme temperatures, far in excess of those of the electrons and protons that comprise the bulk of the plasma. These highly non-thermal distributions make minor ions sensitive probes of the…
The first observed connection between kinetic instabilities driven by proton temperature anisotropy and estimated energy cascade rates in the turbulent solar wind is reported using measurements from the Wind spacecraft at 1 AU. We find…
Based on global conservation principles, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) relaxation theory predicts the existence of several equilibria, such as the Taylor state or global dynamic alignment. These states are generally viewed as very long-time and…
The powerful wind-wind collision in massive star binaries creates a region of high temperature plasma and accelerates particles to relativistic energies. I briefly summarize the hydrodynamics of the wind-wind interaction and the…
We present two-dimensional fully-kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulations of decaying electromagnetic fluctuations. The computational box is such that wavelengths ranging from electron to ion gyroradii are resolved. The parameters used are…
New tridimensional plasma structures, that are oscillatory and classified as non-separable ballooning modes, can emerge in inhomogeneous plasmas and undergo resonant mode-particle interactions, e.g., with a minority population, that can…