Related papers: Intermittency in Collisionless Large-Amplitude Tur…
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…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in plasmas, leading to rich dynamics characterized by irregularity, irreversibility, energy fluctuations across many scales, and energy transfer across many scales. Another fundamental and generic feature of…
We study the intermittency and field-line structure of the MHD turbulence in plasmas with very large magnetic Prandtl numbers. In this regime, which is realized in the interstellar medium, some accretion disks, protogalaxies, galaxy-cluster…
Compressive fluctuations are a minor yet significant component of astrophysical plasma turbulence. In the solar wind, long-wavelength compressive slow-mode fluctuations lead to changes in $\beta_{\parallel \mathrm p}\equiv 8\pi n_{\mathrm…
We simulate incompressible MHD turbulence in the presence of a strong background magnetic field. Our major conclusions are: 1) MHD turbulence is most conveniently described in terms of counter propagating shear Alfven and slow waves. Shear…
Astrophysical and high-energy-density laboratory plasmas often have large-amplitude, sub-Larmor-scale electromagnetic fluctuations excited by various kinetic-streaming or anisotropy-driven instabilities. The Weibel (or the filamentation)…
In this paper, we study the development of anisotropy in strong MHD turbulence in the presence of a large scale magnetic field B 0 by analyzing the results of direct numerical simulations. Our results show that the developed anisotropy…
Among the fundamental and most challenging problems of laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasma physics is to understand the relaxation processes of nearly collisionless plasmas toward quasi-stationary states; and the resultant states of…
Thanks to advances in plasma science and enabling technology, mirror machines are being reconsidered for fusion power plants and as possible fusion volumetric neutron sources. However cross-field transport and turbulence in mirrors remains…
We study the effect of including a BGK collisional kernel on the collective modes of a QCD plasma which has a hard-particle distribution function which is anisotropic in momentum space. We calculate dispersion relations for both the stable…
In this work we report a numerical study of the cosmic magnetic field amplification due to collisionless plasma instabilities. The collisionless magnetohydrodynamic equations derived account for the pressure anisotropy that leads, in…
In a collisionless, magnetized plasma, particles may stream freely along magnetic-field lines, leading to phase "mixing" of their distribution function and consequently to smoothing out of any "compressive" fluctuations (of density,…
Galaxy clusters host a hot, diffuse plasma with poorly understood viscosity and magnetic field amplification. Astrophysical plasmas are often modeled with magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), but low collision rates in environments like the…
In turbulent high-beta astrophysical plasmas (exemplified by the galaxy cluster plasmas), pressure-anisotropy-driven firehose and mirror fluctuations grow nonlinearly to large amplitudes, dB/B ~ 1, on a timescale comparable to the turnover…
Traditionally the effects of MHD instabilities and micro-instabilities on plasma confinement are investigated separately. However, these two instabilities often occur simultaneously, with the overlap of the dynamics on a broad range of…
Small-scale magnetic turbulence observed by the Cluster spacecraft in the plasma sheet is investigated by means of a wavelet estimator suitable for detecting distinct scaling characteristics even in noisy measurements. The spectral…
Cluster plasmas are magnetised already at very low magnetic field strength. Low collisionality implies that conservation of the first adiabatic invariant results in an anisotropic viscous stress (Braginskii viscosity) or, equivalently,…
The standard magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) description of the plasma in the hot, magnetized gas of the intra-cluster (ICM) medium is not adequate because it is weakly collisional. In such collisionless magnetized gas, the microscopic velocity…
We present a new analysis of the anisotropic spectral energy distribution in incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence permeated by a strong mean magnetic field. The turbulent flow is generated by high-resolution pseudo-spectral…
We report on a first-principles numerical and theoretical study of plasma dynamo in a fully kinetic framework. By applying an external mechanical force to an initially unmagnetized plasma, we develop a self-consistent treatment of the…