Related papers: Tearing instability and current-sheet disruption i…
Planetary and stellar dynamos likely result from turbulent motions in magnetofluids with kinematic viscosities that are small compared to their magnetic diffusivities. Laboratory experiments are in progress to produce similar dynamos in…
Observations of galaxy clusters show that the intracluster medium (ICM) is likely to be turbulent and is certainly magnetized. The properties of this magnetized turbulence are determined both by fundamental nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic…
We use 2.5D Magnetohydrodynamic simulations to investigate the spectral signatures of the nonlinear disruption of a tearing unstable current sheet via the generation of multiple secondary current sheets and magnetic islands. During the…
We investigate the influence of background shear flow on linear resistive tearing instabilities with Joule heating for two compressible plasma slab configurations: a Harris current sheet and a force-free, shearing magnetic field that varies…
It has been proposed recently by Loureiro & Boldyrev [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 245101 (2017)] and Mallet et al. [Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 468, 4862 (2017)] that strongly anisotropic current sheets formed in the inertial range of…
Turbulence dynamo deals with amplification of a seed magnetic field in a turbulent medium and has been studied mostly for uniform or spatially homogeneous seed magnetic fields. However, some astrophysical processes (e.g. jets from active…
Weakly-collisional plasmas, such as the solar wind or the intra-cluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters, evolve in the presence of dynamically strong magnetic fields. The turbulent dynamo can amplify magnetic fields to such levels by…
Plasmoid-driven magnetic reconnection in elongated current sheets is suspected to be an ubiquitous phenomenon in space and astrophysical plasmas, but the mechanisms driving its onset and dynamics are still debated. Deciphering the physical…
We have extended our study of the competition between the drive and stabilization of plasma microinstabilities by sheared flow to include electromagnetic effects at low plasma $\beta$ (the ratio of plasma to magnetic pressure). The extended…
We apply a Fourier spectral numerical method to 3D incompressible MHD turbulence with a magnetic Prandtl number $Pr \geq 1$. We examine the processes by which an initially weak, large-scale seed magnetic field and an initially weak,…
Small-scale dynamos are ubiquitous in a broad range of turbulent flows with large-scale shear, ranging from solar and galactic magnetism to accretion disks, cosmology and structure formation. Using high-resolution direct numerical…
We demonstrate with a nonlinear MHD code that angular momentum can be transported due to the magnetic instability of toroidal fields under the influence of differential rotation, and that the resulting effective viscosity may be high enough…
The relationship between a decaying strong turbulence and kinetic instabilities in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using two-dimensional (2-D) hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic field…
Astrophysical current layers, e.g., in pulsar winds, can be electrically charged, while the plasma is charge-symmetric, $e^\pm$. Using PIC simulations, we investigate dynamics and plasmoid formation (tearing instability) in charged…
Magnetic field fluctuations in MHD turbulence can be viewed as current sheets that are progressively more anisotropic at smaller scales. As suggested by Loureiro & Boldyrev (2017) and Mallet et al (2017), below a certain critical thickness…
Nonresonant current instability was identified by Bell (2004) as an important mechanism for magnetic field amplification in supernova remnants. In this paper we focus on studying the nonlinear stage of this instability using the…
Using a full kinetic, implicit particle-in-cell code, iPiC3D, we studied the properties of plasma kinetic turbulence, such as would be found at the interface between the solar wind and the Earth magnetosphere at low latitude during…
Magnetic reconnection in laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas is often invoked to explain explosive energy release and particle acceleration. However, the timescales involved in classical models within the macroscopic MHD regime are…
We study a resistive tearing instability developing in a system evolving through the combined effect of Hall drift in the Electron-MHD limit and Ohmic dissipation. We explore first the exponential growth of the instability in the linear…
When the ion mean free path much exceeds the Larmor radius in a plasma, the viscous stress tensor is altered dramatically, and depends only upon quantities measured along the field lines. This regime corresponds to typical interstellar…