Turbulence and particle energization in strongly magnetized pair plasmas
ORAL
Abstract
Plasma turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysical systems. In some applications, plasma may be relativistically hot. We present phenomenological and numerical studies of Alfvenic turbulence in a collisionless, relativistic pair plasma with an imposed large-scale magnetic field. We consider the regime when the equation of state is relativistic while the plasma fluctuations are mildly relativistic. We discuss the spectra of turbulence and intermittency effects. In collisionless plasmas, particles that interact with turbulent fluctuations do not fully relax to a thermal distribution and end up forming non-Maxwellian tails. We perform particle-in-cell simulations of relativistic decaying turbulence in a pair plasma to study particle energization. We discuss the turbulent cascade and the global particle energy distribution functions.
*This work is partly supported by NSF under Grants PHY-1707272 and PHY-2010098, by NASA under Grant NASA 80NSSC18K0646, and by the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory (US Department of Energy Grant DE-SC0018266). Computational resources were provided by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin (XSEDE Allocations No. TG-PHY110016 and ATM 180015).
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Presenters
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Cristian S Vega
- University of Wisconsin - Madison