Heat transport and instabilities in galaxy-cluster plasmas

Small-scale plasma physics has a large impact on the global structure of the intracluster medium. This talk will focus on two examples of this micro/macro connection: anisotropic transport and buoyancy instabilities. In the first part of the talk, I will review some important theoretical developments relevant to both topics. In the second part, I will describe recent global cluster models that illustrate how plasma processes affect observable quantities such as the temperature, density, and iron abundance profiles of the intracluster medium.