Related papers: Ambipolar Drift Heating in Turbulent Molecular Clo…
Ambipolar diffusion is important in redistributing magnetic flux and in damping Alfven waves in molecular clouds. The importance of ambipolar diffusion on a length scale $\ell$ is governed by the ambipolar diffusion Reynolds number,…
We summarize results on the thermal and ionization structure of self-similar, magnetically-driven, atomic disk winds heated by ambipolar diffusion. We improve upon earlier work by Safier by considering (1) new MHD solutions consistent with…
The ratio of ion to electron heating due to the dissipation of Alfvenic turbulence in astrophysical plasmas is calculated based on a cascade model for turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas. Conditions for validity of this model are…
The atmosphere of a hot jupiter may be subject to a thermo-resistive instability, in which the increasing electrical conductivity with temperature leads to runaway Ohmic heating. We introduce a simplified model of the local dynamics in the…
We study the heat conduction of a cold, thermal cloud in a highly asymmetric trap. The cloud is axially hydrodynamic, but due to the asymmetric trap radially collisionless. By locally heating the cloud we excite a thermal dipole mode and…
Context. Multitransition CO observations of galaxy centers have revealed that significant fractions of the dense circumnuclear gas have high kinetic temperatures, which are hard to explain by pure photon excitation, but may be caused by…
The lower solar atmosphere consists of partially ionized turbulent plasmas harbouring velocity field, magnetic field and current density fluctuations. The correlations amongst these small scale fluctuations give rise to large scale flows…
The ion temperature of the magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn was observed to increase substantially from about 10 to 30 planet radii. Different heating mechanisms have been proposed to explain such observations, including a heating model…
Turbulence influences the behavior of many astrophysical systems, frequently by providing non-thermal pressure support through random bulk motions. Although turbulence is commonly studied in systems with constant volume and mean density,…
In this paper, we study the heating of the magnetized solar chromosphere induced by the large fraction of neutral atoms present in this layer. The presence of neutrals, together with the decrease with height of the collisional coupling,…
Motivated by recent subarcsecond resolution observations of jets from T Tauri stars, we extend the work of \citep{Safier93a, Safier93b} by computing the thermal and ionization structure of self-similar, magnetically-driven, atomic disk…
Magnetic fields play a role in the dynamics of many astrophysical processes, but they are hard to detect. In a partially ionized plasma, a magnetic field works directly on the ionized medium but not on the neutral medium, which gives rise…
The interstellar medium in star-forming galaxies is a multiphase gas in which turbulent support is at least as important as thermal pressure. Sustaining this configuration requires continuous radiative cooling, such that the overall average…
We present 50 individual measurements of the gas temperature and turbulent velocity in the local interstellar medium (LISM) within 100 pc. By comparing the absorption line widths of many ions with different atomic masses, we can…
Using numerical methods, we systematically study in the framework of ideal MHD the effect of magnetic fields on heat transfer within a turbulent gas. We measure the rates of passive scalar diffusion within magnetized fluids and make the…
I discuss the role of self-gravity and radiative heating and cooling in shaping the nature of the turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) of our galaxy. The heating and cooling cause it to be highly compressible, and, in some regimes of…
Recent work has shown that ions are strongly coupled in atmospheric pressure plasmas when the ionization fraction is sufficiently large, leading to a temperature increase from disorder-induced heating that is not accounted for in standard…
The vertical temperature structure of a protoplanetary disk bears on several processes relevant to planet formation, such as gas and dust grain chemistry, ice lines and convection. The temperature profile is controlled by irradiation from…
We study ambipolar diffusion in strongly magnetised neutron stars, with special focus on the effects of neutrino reaction rates and the impact of a superfluid/superconducting transition in the neutron star core. For axisymmetric magnetic…
We study the heating of charged test particles in three-dimensional numerical simulations of weakly compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence (``Alfvenic turbulence''); these results are relevant to particle heating and acceleration…