Related papers: Particle acceleration in an MHD-scale system of mu…
Plasmoid instability accelerates reconnection in collisional plasmas by transforming a laminar reconnection layer into numerous plasmoids connected by secondary current sheets in two dimensions (2D) and by fostering self-generated turbulent…
Radiative turbulent mixing layers are expected to form pervasively at the phase boundaries in multiphase astrophysical systems. This inherently small scale structure is dynamically crucial because it directly regulates the mass, momentum…
Magnetic reconnection is an explosive process that accelerates particles to high energies in Earth's magnetosphere, offering a unique natural laboratory to study this phenomenon. This study investigates how well data-driven fully kinetic…
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…
We study a two-dimensional granular system where external driving force is applied to each particle in the system in such a way that the system is driven into a steady state by balancing the energy input and the dissipation due to inelastic…
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…
Compressible vortex sheets are fundamental waves in entropy solutions to the multidimensional hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. For the Euler equations in 2-D gas dynamics, the classical linearized stability analysis on compressible…
Energetic particles that undergo strong pitch-angle scattering and diffuse through a plasma containing strong compressible MHD turbulence undergo diffusion in momentum space with diffusion coefficient Dp. In this paper, the contribution of…
It is believed that turbulence may have a significant impact on star formation and the dynamics and evolution of the molecular clouds in which this occurs. It is also known that non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic effects influence the nature of…
A new computational model is presented suitable for exploring the self-consistent production of energetic electrons during magnetic reconnection in macroscale systems. The equations are based on the recent discovery that parallel electric…
This research was motivated by the recent observations indicating very strong magnetic fields at some supernova remnant shocks, which suggests in-situ generation of magnetic turbulence. The dissertation presents a numerical model of…
Building on recent progress in the understanding of particle transport in magnetized plasmas, we derive a scaling law for the formation of nonthermal spectral tails in mildly and strongly magnetized turbulent environments. We validate this…
3-D extended-MHD simulations of the magnetized ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability are presented for the first time. Previous 2-D simulations claiming perturbation suppression by magnetic tension are shown to be misleading, as they do not…
Magnetic reconnection can explosively release magnetic energy when opposing magnetic fields merge and annihilate through a current sheet, driving plasma jets and accelerating non-thermal particle populations to high energy, in plasmas…
A wide variety of astrophysical phenomena involve the flow of turbulent magnetized gas with relativistic velocity or energy density. Examples include gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei, pulsars, magnetars, micro-quasars, merging…
Diffusive Shock Acceleration (DSA) cannot efficiently accelerate particles without the presence of self-consistently generated or pre-existing strong turbulence ($ \delta B/B \sim 1 $) in the vicinity of the shock. The problem we address in…
Magnetized turbulence and magnetic reconnection are often invoked to explain the nonthermal emission observed from a wide variety of astrophysical sources. By means of fully-kinetic 2D and 3D PIC simulations, we investigate the interplay…
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…
Observational data require a rich variety of mechanisms to accelerate fast particles in astrophysical environments operating under different conditions. The mechanisms discussed in the literature include varying magnetic fields in compact…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysics. It radically changes many astrophysical phenomena, in particular, the propagation and acceleration of cosmic rays. We present the modern understanding of compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD)…