Related papers: The Physics of Hybrid Thermal/Non-Thermal Plasmas
The departure of particle distributions from the Maxwellian is commonly observed in space plasmas. These non-Maxwellian distributions which are typical for plasmas that are not in thermal equilibrium, can be modeled with…
Nonthermal velocity distributions with much greater tails than the Maxwellian have been observed for radical atoms in plasmas for a long time. Historically, such velocity distributions have been modeled by a two-temperature Maxwell…
In a plasma at temperature close to the fundamental scale a small fraction of particles will experience transplanckian collisions that may result in microscopic black holes (BHs). We study the dynamics of a system (a black hole gas) defined…
Accreting black holes in galactic X-ray sources are surrounded by hot plasma. The innermost part of these systems is likely a corona with different temperatures for ions and electrons. In the so-called low-hard state, hot electrons…
The lack of our knowledge on how angular momentum is transported in accretion disks around black holes has prevented us from fully understanding their high energy emissions. We briefly highlight some theoretical models, emphasizing the…
Dissipative processes cause collisionless plasmas in many systems to develop nonthermal particle distributions with broad power-law tails. The prevalence of power-law energy distributions in space/astrophysical observations and kinetic…
Plasmas in an accretion flow are heated by MHD turbulence generated through the magneto-rotational instability. The viscous stress driving the accretion is intimately connected to the microscopic processes of turbulence dissipation. We show…
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…
The mechanism of heating for hot, dilute, and turbulent plasmas represents a long-standing problem in space physics, whose implications concern both near-Earth environments and astrophysical systems. In order to explore the possible role of…
Particle velocity distribution functions (VDF) in space plasmas often show non Maxwellian suprathermal tails decreasing as a power law of the velocity. Such distributions are well fitted by the so-called Kappa distribution. The presence of…
In a hybrid thermal-nonthermal plasma, we find that the dominant emission and absorption mechanisms are synchrotron by nonthermal electrons and bremsstrahlung by thermal electrons. These two processes significantly change the spectrum from…
Does overall thermal equilibrium exist between ions and electrons in a weakly collisional, magnetised, turbulent plasma---and, if not, how is thermal energy partitioned between ions and electrons? This is a fundamental question in plasma…
Heating of polar coronal holes during solar minimum and acceleration of the fast solar wind issuing therefrom lack comprehensive theoretical understanding. Wave particle interactions are considered to have crucial effects on the extreme…
1) Background: the budget of non-thermal energy in galaxy clusters is not well constrained, owing to the observational and theoretical difficulties in studying these diluted plasmas on large scales. 2) Method: we use recent cosmological…
We investigate the apparent thermality of Hawking radiation in the semi-classical limit of quantum black holes using the mean-field limit of a chiral spin-chain simulator, which models fermions propagating on a black hole space-time in the…
Observations show that plasma particles in the solar wind frequently display power-law velocity distributions, which can be isotropic or anisotropic. Particularly, the velocity distribution functions of solar wind electrons are frequently…
Collisionless and weakly collisional plasmas often exhibit non-thermal quasi-equilibria. Among these quasi-equilibria, distributions with power-law tails are ubiquitous. It is shown that the statistical-mechanical approach originally…
A cold electron beam propagating through a background plasma is subject to filamentation process due to theWeibel instability. If the initial beam radius is large compared with the electron skin depth and the beam density is much smaller…
Electron and ion energization (i.e., heating and nonthermal acceleration) is a fundamental, but poorly understood, outcome of plasma turbulence. In this work, we present new results on this topic from particle-in-cell simulations of driven…
The hard X-ray spectra of accreting black holes systems are generally well-fit by thermal Comptonization models with temperatures $\sim 100$ keV. We demonstrate why, over many orders of magnitude in heating rate and seed photon supply, hot…