Related papers: Firehose instabilities triggered by the solar wind…
Despite the fact that electrons observed in situ in space plasmas have three major components-the quasi-thermal core, suprathermal halo, and strahl-the analysis of instabilities triggered by kinetic, velocity-space anisotropies (such as…
Excitation of Weibel magnetic fields in an initially non-magnetized though anisotropic plasma may trigger other low-frequency instabilities fed by pressure anisotropy. It is shown that under Weibel-like-stable conditions the Weibel-like…
Ion anisotropies can affect a host of processes within the magnetosphere, from modifying the growth rate of various instabilities to the energization and mass transport within the magnetosphere. Global multi-fluid simulations using a full…
Protons (ionized hydrogen) in the solar wind frequently exhibit distinct temperatures ($T_{\perp p}$ and $T_{\parallel p}$) perpendicular and parallel to the plasma's background magnetic-field. Numerous prior studies of the interplanetary…
We show that the interaction of an accretion disk with the magnetosphere of a neutron star can excite resonant shear Alfven waves with Hz-kHz frequencies in a region of enhanced density gradients. This is the the region where accretion…
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,…
Previous studies have shown that the observed temperature anisotropies of protons and alpha particles in the solar wind are constrained by theoretical thresholds for pressure-anisotropy-driven instabilities such as the…
The fast solar wind is a collisionless plasma permeated by plasma waves on many different scales. A plasma wave represents the natural interplay between the periodic changes of the electromagnetic field and the associated coherent motions…
In this work, we derive a dispersion equation that describes the excitation of the oblique (or Alfv\'en) firehose instability in a plasma that contains both electron and ion species modelled by bi-kappa velocity distribution functions. The…
Among the fundamental and most challenging problems of laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasma physics is to understand the relaxation processes of nearly collisionless plasmas toward quasi-stationary states; and the resultant states of…
A magnetic field was recently shown to enhance field-parallel heat conduction in a strongly correlated plasma whereas cross-field conduction is reduced. Here we show that in such plasmas, the magnetic field has the additional effect of…
Slow dynamical changes in magnetic-field strength and invariance of the particles' magnetic moments generate ubiquitous pressure anisotropies in weakly collisional, magnetized astrophysical plasmas. This renders them unstable to fast,…
Temperature anisotropy and field-aligned skewness are commonly observed non-thermal features in electron velocity distributions in the solar wind. These characteristics can act as a source of free energy to destabilize different…
Particle velocity distributions measured in the weakly collisional solar wind are frequently found to be non-Maxwellian, but how these non-Maxwellian distributions impact the physics of plasma turbulence in the solar wind remains…
Weakly collisional space plasmas are rarely in local thermal equilibrium and often exhibit non-Maxwellian electron and ion velocity distributions that lead to the growth of microinstabilities, that is, enhanced electric and magnetic fields…
We use particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of a collisionless, electron-ion plasma with a decreasing background magnetic field, $B$, to study the effect of velocity-space instabilities on the viscous heating and thermal conduction of the…
The relationship between a decaying strong turbulence and the mirror instability in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using two-dimensional hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic field perpendicular…
During solar storms, the polar cusp often exhibits electron populations with distinct velocity distributions, which may be associated with the two-stream instability. This study reveals the evolution of the two-stream instability associated…
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…
We present an analysis of simultaneous particle and field measurements from the ARTEMIS spacecraft which demonstrate that quasi-parallel whistler waves in the solar wind can be generated locally by a bulk flow of halo electrons (whistler…