Related papers: Kinetic turbulence in shining pair plasma: intermi…
Cosmic sources of gamma-ray radiation in the GeV range are often characterized by violent variability, in particular this concerns blazars, gamma-ray bursts, and the pulsar wind nebula Crab. Such gamma-ray emission requires a very efficient…
In strongly magnetized astrophysical plasma systems, magnetic reconnection is believed to be a primary process during which explosive energy release and particle acceleration occur, leading to significant high-energy emission. Past years…
Proton temperature anisotropies between the directions parallel and perpendicular to the mean magnetic field are usually observed in the solar wind plasma. Here, we employ a high-resolution hybrid particle-in-cell simulation in order to…
Nonthermal radiation observed from astrophysical systems containing relativistic jets and shocks, e.g., gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and microquasars commonly exhibit power-law emission spectra. Recent PIC…
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…
The collision of two expanding plasma clouds is investigated, emphasizing instabilities and electron energization in the plasma mixing layer. This work is directly relevant to laboratory experiments with explosively-created laser or z-pinch…
Microturbulence, i.e. enhanced fluctuations of plasma density, electric and magnetic fields, is of great interest in astrophysical plasmas, but occurs on spatial scales far too small to resolve by remote sensing, e.g., at ~ 1-100 cm in the…
The relationship between a decaying plasma turbulence and proton fire hose instabilities in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using three-dimensional (3-D) hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic…
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…
Synchrotron radiation detected from relativistic astrophysical objects such as pulsar-wind nebulae and {jets from active galactic nuclei} depends on the magnetic fields and the distribution functions of energetic electrons in these systems.…
Turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and shocks can be present in explosively unstable plasmas, forming a new electromagnetic environment, which we call here turbulent reconnection, and where spontaneous formation of current sheets takes…
Turbulence develops in any stressed flow when the scales of the forcing are much larger than those of the dissipation. In neutral fluids, it consists of chaotic motions in physical space but with a universal energy spectrum in Fourier…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysical fluids. Therefore it is necessary to study magnetic reconnection in turbulent environments. The model of fast turbulent reconnection proposed in Lazarian & Vishniac 1999 has been successfully tested…
Emerging possibilities for creating and studying novel plasma regimes, e.g. relativistic plasmas and dense systems, in a controlled laboratory environment also requires new modeling tools for such systems. This brings motivation for…
The change of the distribution function of electron-positron pair beams determines whether GeV photons can be produced as secondary radiation from TeV photons. We will discuss the instabilities driven by pair beams. The system of a thermal…
The fate of relativistic pair beams produced in the intergalactic medium by very high energy emission from blazars remains controversial in the literature. The possible role of resonance beam plasma instability has been studied both…
The next few years will see next-generation high-power laser facilities (such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure) become operational, for which it is important to understand how interaction with intense laser pulses affects the bulk…
We simulate decaying turbulence in a homogeneous pair plasma using three dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) method. A uniform background magnetic field permeates the plasma such that the magnetic pressure is three times…
Non-radiating protons in the radio lobes have an essential role to form the jet morphology which is shown by recent radio and X-ray observations. However, since protons and electrons are not always in energy equilibrium due to weak Coulomb…
Using a linear stability analysis and two and three-dimensional nonlinear simulations, we study the physics of buoyancy instabilities in a combined thermal and relativistic (cosmic ray) plasma, motivated by the application to clusters of…