Related papers: Particle acceleration in an MHD-scale system of mu…
The physical picture of interacting magnetic islands provides a useful paradigm for certain plasma dynamics in a variety of physical environments, such as the solar corona, the heliosheath, and the Earth's magnetosphere. In this work, we…
We investigate hydromagnetic turbulence of primordial magnetic fields using magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in an expanding universe. We present the basic, covariant MHD equations, find solutions for MHD waves in the early universe, and…
Scale interactions in Hall MHD are studied using both the mean field theory derivation of transport coefficients, and direct numerical simulations in three space dimensions. In the magnetically dominated regime, the eddy resistivity is…
Context: The strong electric fields associated with magnetic reconnection in solar flares are a plausible mechanism to accelerate populations of high energy, non-thermal particles. One such reconnection scenario occurs at a 3D magnetic null…
When a particle crosses a region of space where the curvature radius of the magnetic field line shrinks below its gyroradius $r_{\rm g}$, it experiences a non-adiabatic (magnetic moment violating) change in pitch angle. The present paper…
Magnetic field strengths inferred for relativistic outflows including gamma-ray bursts (GRB) and active galactic nuclei (AGN) are larger than naively expected by orders of magnitude. We present three-dimensional relativistic…
In magnetized astrophysical outflows, the dissipation of field energy into particle energy via magnetic reconnection is often invoked to explain the observed non-thermal signatures. By means of two- and three-dimensional particle-in-cell…
When supersonic plasma flows collide, many physical processes contribute to the morphology of the resulting shock. One of these processes is the acceleration of non-thermal ions, which will, eventually, reach relativistic speeds and become…
Global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities are investigated in a computationally tractable two-dimensional model of the solar tachocline. The model's differential rotation yields stability in the absence of a magnetic field, but if a…
We investigate the acceleration of charged particles (both electrons and protons) at collisionless shocks predicted to exist in the vicinity of solar flares. The existence of standing termination shocks has been examined by flare models and…
The dynamics of a propagating magnetic island interacting with a resistive wall or a static external magnetic perturbation is investigated using two-fluid, drift-MHD theory in slab geometry. In both cases, the island equation of motion is…
Forced magnetic reconnection, a reconnection event triggered by external perturbation, should be ubiquitous in the solar corona. Energy released during such cases can be much greater than that which was introduced by the perturbation. It is…
Within the resistive magnetohydrodynamic model, high-Lundquist number reconnection layers are unstable to the plasmoid instability, leading to a turbulent evolution where the reconnection rate can be independent of the underlying…
Due to its ubiquitous presence, turbulence is often invoked to explain the origin of nonthermal particles in astrophysical sources of high-energy emission. With particle-in-cell simulations, we study decaying turbulence in…
In the present study, we conduct direct numerical simulations of two-way force-coupled particle-laden compressible turbulent boundary layers at the free-stream Mach number of 2.0 for the purpose of examining the effects of particles on the…
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,…
Current sheets formed in magnetic reconnection events are found to be unstable to high-wavenumber perturbations. The instability is very fast: its maximum growth rate scales as S^{1/4} v_A/L, where L is the length of the sheet, v_A the…
Numerical simulations of particle acceleration in magnetized turbulence have recently observed powerlaw spectra where pile-up distributions are rather expected. We interpret this as evidence for particle segregation based on acceleration…
The tearing mode instability and the associated magnetic islands can lead to a degradation of tokamak plasma performance and eventually to a disruption. A crucial issue for the extension of advanced tokamak scenarios to long pulse operation…
We present 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical simulations of the evolution of self--gravitating and weakly magnetized disks with an adiabatic equation of state. Such disks are subject to the development of both the magnetorotational and…