Related papers: Stochastic ion and electron heating on drift insta…
Laminar--turbulent transition remains a major uncertainty in the aerothermal design of entry, descent, and landing (EDL) vehicles. We show that, under high-enthalpy Mars-entry conditions, the detached bow shock and shock-generated…
Shocks are often invoked as heating mechanisms in astrophysical systems, with both adiabatic compression and dissipative heating that leading to temperature increases. Whilst shocks are reasonably well understood for ideal…
We review recent results on the nonlinear development of thermal instability in the context of the turbulent atomic interstellar medium (ISM). First, we pre- sent a brief summary of the linear theory, remarking that, in the atomic ISM, the…
The nonlinear development of the strong Buneman instability and the associated fast electron heating in thin current layers with $\Omega_e/\omega_{pe} <1$ are explored. Phase mixing of the electrons in wave potential troughs and a rapid…
Explosive phenomena are known to trigger a wealth of shocks in warm plasma environments, including the solar chromosphere and molecular clouds where the medium consists of both ionised and neutral species. Partial ionisation is critical in…
The structure of the hot downstream region below a radiative accretion shock, such as that of an accreting compact object, may oscillate due to a global thermal instability. The oscillatory behaviour depends on the functional forms of the…
Despite heat flux's role in regulating energy conversion in collisionless plasmas, its properties and evolution in the magnetosheath downstream of the Earth's bow shock are scarcely explored. We use MMS in situ measurements to quantify and…
Thermodynamics of nanoscale devices is an active area of research. Despite their noisy surrounding they often produce mechanical work (e.g. micro-heat engines), display rectified Brownian motion (e.g. molecular motors). This invokes…
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…
We extend the linear analysis of the drag instability in a 1D perpendicular isothermal C-shock by Gu & Chen to 2D perpendicular and oblique C-shocks in the typical environment of star-forming clouds. Simplified dispersion relations are…
The cross-magnetic-field (i.e., perpendicular) profile of ion temperature and the perpendicular profile of the magnetic-field-aligned (parallel) plasma flow are sometimes inhomogeneous for space and laboratory plasma. Instability caused by…
Further progress in the development of ECR ion sources (ECRIS) requires deeper understanding of the underlying physics. One of the topics that remains obscure, though being crucial for the performance of the ECRIS, is the electron energy…
Ion Weibel instability is considered to be the dominant physics for the dissipation in high-Mach number astrophysical shocks such as supernova remnant shocks and gamma-ray burst shocks. We study the instability dependence on various…
The theory of diffusive acceleration of energetic particles at shock fronts assumes charged particles undergo spatial diffusion in a uniform magnetic field. If, however, the magnetic field is not uniform, but has a stochastic or braided…
A paradigm for isothermal, mechanical rectification of stochastic fluctuations is introduced in this paper. The central idea is to transform energy injected by random perturbations into rigid-body rotational kinetic energy. The prototype…
Magnetic nozzles are a key component of electrodeless plasma thrusters, acting as their main acceleration stage. Non-stationary phenomena common to the entire range of $E \times B$ devices, such as oscillations and instabilities, are likely…
Numerical studies of ionic motion through solid electrolytes commonly involve static nudged-elastic band (NEB) methods or costly \emph{ab initio} molecular dynamics (AIMD). Building on a time-local model of current carrier-electrolyte…
The heating of electrons in collisionless magnetic reconnection is explored in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations with non-zero guide fields so that electrons remain magnetized. In this regime electric fields parallel to B accelerate…
The study of collisionless shocks and their role in cosmic-ray acceleration has gained increasing importance through both observations and simulations. Accurately modeling the shock transition region, where particle injection occurs,…
A Stirling engine made of a colloidal particle in contact with a nonequilibrium bath is considered and analyzed with the tools of stochastic energetics. We model the bath by non Gaussian persistent noise acting on the colloidal particle.…