Related papers: Resolving the mystery of electron perpendicular te…
Thermal quench of a nearly collisionless plasma against a cooling boundary or region is an undesirable off-normal event in magnetic fusion experiments, but an ubiquitous process of cosmological importance in astrophysical plasmas. There is…
Heating of charged particles via collisionless shocks, while ubiquitous in the universe, is an intriguing yet puzzling plasma phenomenon. One outstanding question is how electrons and ions approach an equilibrium after they were heated to…
In this study, the physics of sheath formation in a collisional two-electron temperature plasma in the presence of an oblique external magnetic field has been investigated. At first, a comparative study among the fluid electron model,…
A collisional magnetized plasma consisting of two temperature electrons has been investigated numerically to study the sheath structure and the ion energy flux to the wall. The low-temperature electrons are described by Maxwellian…
Seventy crossings of the Earths bow shock by the THEMIS satellites have been used to study thermal electron heating in collisionless, quasi-perpendicular shocks. It was found that the temperature increase of thermal electrons differed from…
An ablative plasma shock can emanate from the interface between a cold/dense plasma and a hot/dilute ambient plasma, where the plasma mean-free-path is much longer than the temperature gradient length. The shock is driven by thermal flux…
We have used the free expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas as a time-resolved probe of electron temperature. A combination of experimental measurements of the ion expansion velocity and numerical simulations characterize the crossover…
It is shown that the anomalous resistivity, thermal conductivity, and magnetic pressure of hot plasmas can be explained by the assumption that the collisional electron-ion cross-section becomes constant above some critical temperature. This…
We study processes at the transition region between hot (rare) and cold (dense) plasma in the collisionless regime. We use a 3-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (3-D PIC) relativistic code. Motivated by the transition region in…
Turbulence is a predominant process for energizing electrons and ions in collisionless astrophysical plasmas, and thus is responsible for shaping their radiative signatures (luminosity, spectra, and variability). To better understand the…
We perform fully-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of an hot plasma that expands radially in a cylindrical geometry. The aim of the paper is to study the consequent development of the electron temperature anisotropy in an expanding…
Collisionless shocks heat electrons in the solar wind, interstellar blast waves, and hot gas permeating galaxy clusters. How much shock heating goes to electrons instead of ions, and what plasma physics controls electron heating? We…
A theory for presheath-like structures near probes biased at and above the plasma potential is developed for collisionless plasmas with an electron-neutral mean free path on the order of the chamber scale. The theory predicts presheath-like…
Electron sheaths form near the surface of objects biased more positive than the plasma potential, such as in the electron saturation region of a Langmuir probe trace. Generally, the formation of electron sheaths requires that the…
The electron sheath is a particular electron-rich sheath with negative net charges where plasma potential is lower than the biased electrode. Here an improved understanding of electron sheath theory is provided using both fluid and kinetic…
The localized deposition of the energy of a laser pulse, as it ablates a solid target, introduces high thermal pressure gradients in the plasma. The thermal expansion of this laser-heated plasma into the ambient medium (ionized residual…
Observational evidence in space and astrophysical plasmas with long collisional mean free path suggests that more massive charged particles may be preferentially heated. One possible mechanism for this is the turbulent cascade of energy…
Using 2D particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulations we study electron acceleration by temperature anisotropy instabilities, assuming conditions typical of above-the-loop-top (ALT) sources in solar flares. We focus on the long-term effect of…
A common occurrence in weakly collisional space plasmas is the unequal electron-ion temperatures. The pressure-strain interaction provides a mechanism-agnostic pathway for increasing plasma internal energy through spatiotemporally local…
Non-thermal power-law distribution functions are ubiquitous in astrophysical, space, and laboratory kinetic plasmas, but their origin remains unclear. A related puzzle is the temperature inversion of the solar corona. We show that these…