Publications List
We examine the effect of an external guide field and current sheet thickness on the growth rates and nature of three dimensional unstable modes of an electron current sheet driven by electron shear flow. The growth rate of the fastest growing mode drops rapidly with current sheet thickness but increases slowly with the strength of the guide…
A linear experiment dedicated to the study of driven magnetic reconnection is presented. The new device (VINETA II) is suitable for investigating both collisional and near collisionless reconnection. Reconnection is achieved by externally driving magnetic field lines towards an X-point, inducing a current in the background plasma which…
The numerical simulation of turbulence and flows in almost ideal, large-Reynolds-number astrophysical plasmas motivates the implementation of almost conservative MHD computer codes. They should efficiently calculate, use highly parallelized schemes scaling well with large numbers of CPU cores, allows to obtain a high grid resolution over large…
We propose a scenario for launching relativistic jets from rotating black holes, in which small-scale magnetic flux loops, sustained by disc turbulence, are forced to inflate and open by differential rotation between the black hole and the accretion flow. This mechanism does not require a large-scale net magnetic flux in the accreting plasma…
This is the first in a series of papers about collisionless, electrostatic micro-instabilities in stellarators, with an emphasis on trapped-particle modes. It is found that, in so-called maximum-J configurations, trapped-particle instabilities are absent in large regions of parameter space. Quasi-isodynamic stellarators have this…
Microinstabilities exhibit a rich variety of behavior in stellarators due to the many degrees of freedom in the magnetic geometry. It has recently been found that certain stellarators (quasi-isodynamic ones with maximum-J geometry) are partly resilient to trapped-particle instabilities, because fast-bouncing particles tend to extract energy…
We investigate the linear theory of the ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) mode, with the goal of developing a general understanding that may be applied to stellarators. We highlight the Wendelstein 7X (W7-X) device. Simple fluid and kinetic models that follow closely from existing literature are reviewed and two new first-principle models are…
We introduce an extensible multi-fluid moment model in the context of collisionless magnetic reconnection. This model evolves full Maxwell equations, and simultaneously moments of the Vlasov-Maxwell equation for each species in the plasma. Effects like electron inertia and pressure gradient are self-consistently embedded in the resulting multi…
We present the first comprehensive study of r-process element nucleosynthesis in the ejecta of compact binary mergers (CBMs) and their relic black-hole (BH)-torus systems. The evolution of the BH-accretion tori is simulated for seconds with a Newtonian hydrodynamics code including viscosity effects, pseudo-Newtonian gravity for rotating BHs,…
We study dust transport in turbulent protoplanetary disks using three-dimensional global unstratified magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations including Lagrangian dust particles. The turbulence is driven by the magnetorotational instability (MRI) with either ideal or non-ideal MHD that includes ambipolar diffusion (AD). In ideal MHD simulations,…
The nonlinear growth of the internal kink mode is studied numerically using reduced magnetohydrodynamic equations in cylinder geometry. For low Lundquist numbers, S 107, the already well-known results have been reproduced: a m/n = 1/1 magnetic island (m: poloidal, n: toroidal mode number) grows…
The Crab Nebula was formed after the collapse of a massive star about a thousand years ago, leaving behind a pulsar that inflates a bubble of ultra-relativistic electron-positron pairs permeated with magnetic field. The observation of brief but bright flares of energetic gamma rays suggests that pairs are accelerated to PeV energies within a…
We study super-Eddington accretion flows onto black holes using a global three-dimensional radiation magneto-hydrodynamical simulation. We solve the time-dependent radiative transfer equation for the specific intensities to accurately calculate the angular distribution of the emitted radiation. Turbulence generated by the magneto-rotational…
An electrostatic gyrokinetic-based model is applied to simulate parallel plasma transport in the scrape-off layer to a divertor plate. The authors focus on a test problem that has been studied previously, using parameters chosen to model a heat pulse driven by an edge-localized mode (ELM) in JET. Previous work has used direct particle-in-cell…
We investigate beta-interactions of free nucleons and their impact on the electron fraction (Y_e) and r-process nucleosynthesis in ejecta characteristic of binary neutron star mergers (BNSMs). For that we employ trajectories from a relativistic BNSM model to represent the density-temperature evolutions in our parametric study. In the high…
We present the first comprehensive study of r-process element nucleosynthesis in the ejecta of compact binary mergers (CBMs) and their relic black-hole (BH)-torus systems. The evolution of the BH-accretion tori is simulated for seconds with a Newtonian hydrodynamics code including viscosity effects, pseudo-Newtonian gravity for rotating BHs,…
Accretion disks are likely threaded by external vertical magnetic flux, which enhances the level of turbulence via the magnetorotational instability (MRI). Using shearing-box simulations, we find that such external magnetic flux also strongly enhances the amplitude of banded radial density variations known as zonal flows. Moreover, we report…
Motivated by the fact that geomagnetic field inhomogeneity is weak close to the chorus generation region and the observational evidence that falling‐tone chorus tend to have large oblique angles of propagation, we propose that falling‐tone chorus start as a marginally unstable mode. The marginally unstable mode requires the presence of a…