Related papers: Recovering Gardner Restacking with Purely Diffusiv…
Rearranging the six-dimensional phase space of particles in plasma can release energy. The rearrangement may happen through the application of electric and magnetic fields, subject to various constraints. The maximum energy that can be…
The available energy of a plasma is defined as the maximum amount by which the plasma energy can be lowered by volume-preserving rearrangements in phase space, a so-called Gardner re-stacking. A general expression is derived for the…
Waves propagating through a bounded plasma can rearrange the densities of states in the six-dimensional velocity-configuration phase space. Depending on the rearrangement, the wave energy can either increase or decrease, with the difference…
Diffusive operations, which mix the populations of different elements of phase space, can irreversibly transform a given initial state into any of a spectrum of different states from which no further energy can be extracted through…
The concept of available energy of a collisionless plasma is discussed in the context of magnetic confinement. The available energy quantifies how much of the plasma energy can be converted into fluctuations (including nonlinear ones) and…
Ambiguities in the definition of stored energy within distributed or radiating electromagnetic systems motivate the discussion of the well-defined concept of recoverable energy. This concept is commonly overlooked by the community and the…
A `polydisperse' system has an infinite number of conserved densities. We give a rational procedure for projecting its infinite-dimensional free energy surface onto a subspace comprising a finite number of linear combinations of densities…
Free energy, widely used as a measure of turbulence intensity in weakly collisional plasmas, has been recently found to be a suitable basis to describe both linear and nonlinear growth in a wide class gyrokinetic systems. The simplicity…
The dielectric function for electron gas with parabolic energy bands is derived in a fractional dimensional space. The static response function shows a good dimensional dependance. The plasma frequencies are obtained from the roots of the…
A primary technical challenge for harnessing fusion energy is to control and extract energy from a non-thermal distribution of charged particles. The fact that phase space evolves by symplectomorphisms fundamentally limits how a…
The concept of plasma relaxation as a constrained energy minimization is reviewed. Recent work by the authors on generalizing this approach to partially relaxed three-dimensional plasma systems in a way consistent with chaos theory is…
Reconnection is one of the key processes in astrophysical and laboratory plasmas: it is the opposite of a dynamo. Looking at energy, a dynamo transforms kinetic energy in magnetic energy while reconnection takes magnetic energy and returns…
Free energy and entropy are examined in detail from the standpoint of classical thermodynamics. The approach is logically based on the fact that thermodynamic work is mediated by thermal energy through the tendency for nonthermal energy to…
A theoretical model for polydisperse systems of hard spheres is said to be truncatable when the excess free energy depends on the size distribution through a finite number $K$ of moments. This Note proves an exact scaling relation for…
Plasma turbulence is ubiquitous in space and astrophysical plasmas, playing an important role in plasma energization, but the physical mechanisms leading to dissipation of the turbulent energy remain to be definitively identified. Kinetic…
The usual theory of plasma relaxation, based on the selective decay of magnetic energy over the (global) magnetic helicity, predicts a force-free state for a plasma. Such a force-free state is inadequate to describe most realistic plasma…
Upper bounds are derived on the amount of magnetic energy that can be generated by dynamo action in collisional and collisionless plasmas with and without external forcing. A hierarchy of mathematical descriptions is considered for the…
We consider a free-boundary and free-discontinuity energy connecting phase separation and fracture in an elastic material. The energy excludes the contribution of phase boundaries in the cracked region, providing a heuristic approximation…
For a Z-pinch geometry, we report on the nonlinear redistribution of free energy across scales perpendicular to the magnetic guide field, for a turbulent plasma described in the framework of gyrokinetics. The analysis is performed using a…
It has always been considered a serious error to treat the cosmological redshift as a Doppler velocity effect rather than the result of space expansion. It is demonstrated here that in practical terms this is not the case, and that the…