Related papers: A Prospectus on Kinetic Heliophysics
Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instabilities are prevalent in many physical regimes ranging from astrophysical to laboratory plasmas and have primarily been studied using fluid models, the majority of which have been ideal fluid models. This work is…
Kinetic helicity is a fundamental characteristics of astrophysical turbulent flows. It is not only responsible for the generation of large-scale magnetic fields in the Sun, stars, and spiral galaxies, but it also affects turbulent diffusion…
For a magnetised plasma in a straight magnetic guide field, we derive a set of four-dimensional kinetic equations, which can capture electromagnetic turbulence in the drift kinetic limit. To do so, we start from the gyrokinetic equations,…
Kinetic plasma processes have been investigated in the framework of solar wind turbulence, employing Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell (HVM) simulations. The dependency of proton temperature anisotropy T_{\perp}/T_{\parallel} on the parallel plasma…
We review recent progress on collisionless relativistic shocks. Kinetic instability theory is briefed including its predictions and limitations. The main focus is on numerical experiments in (i) pair and (ii) electron-nucleon plasmas. The…
Synthetic turbulence is a relevant tool to study complex astrophysical and space plasma environments inaccessible by direct simulation. However, conventional models lack intermittent coherent structures, which are essential in realistic…
The nonlinear magnetic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHi), and the turbulence it creates, appears in many astrophysical systems. This includes those systems where the local plasma conditions are such that the plasma is not fully ionised,…
We study the radial distribution of pressure, density, temperature and flow velocity fields at different times in a two dimensional hard sphere gas that is initially at rest and disturbed by injecting kinetic energy in a localized region…
Gyrokinetics is a rich and rewarding playground to study some of the mysteries of modern physics. In this thesis I present work, motivated by the quest for fusion energy, which seeks to uncover some of the inner workings of turbulence in…
The complex interaction between shocks and plasma turbulence is extremely important to address crucial features of energy conversion in a broad range of astrophysical systems. We study the interaction between a supercritical, perpendicular…
We report an experimental study of particle kinematics in a 3-dimensional system of inelastic spheres fluidized by intense vibration. The motion of particles in the interior of the medium is tracked by high speed video imaging, yielding a…
This review examines complexity science in Heliophysics, describing it not as a discipline, but as a paradigm. In the context of Heliophysics, complexity science is the study of a star, interplanetary environment, magnetosphere, upper and…
A hybrid mesoscopic multi-particle collision model is used to study diffusion-influenced reaction kinetics. The mesoscopic particle dynamics conserves mass, momentum and energy so that hydrodynamic effects are fully taken into account.…
Over the last decade, substantial efforts have been devoted to understanding the stability properties, transport phenomena, and long-term evolution of weakly-collisional, magnetized plasmas which are stratified in temperature. These studies…
Astrophysical plasmas can have parameters vastly different from the more studied laboratory and space plasmas. In particular, the magnetic fields can be the dominant component of the plasma, with energy-density exceeding the particle…
Evolving from turbulent states the 2D fluids and the plasmas reach states characterized by a high degree of order, consisting of few vortices. These asymptotic states represent a small subset in the space of functions and are characterised…
In this study we explore the statistics of pressure fluctuations in kinetic collisionless turbulence. A 2.5D kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation of decaying turbulence is used to investigate pressure balance via the evolution of…
Magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) turbulence is ubiquitous in magnetized astrophysical plasmas, and it radically changes a great variety of astrophysical processes. In this review, we give the concept of MHD turbulence and explain the origin of…
Astrophysical plasmas in accretion discs are usually treated in the framework of fluid or MHD approaches but there are some situations where these treatments become inadequate and one needs to revert to the more fundamental underlying…
In this paper we investigate the transport of energetic particles in turbulent plasmas. A numerical approach is used to simulate the effect of the background plasma on the motion of energetic protons. The background plasma is in a…