Lev Arzamasskiy
Hybrid-Kinetic Simulations of Low- and High-Beta Turbulence
leva@astro.princeton.edu
Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, 4 Ivy Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540
A lot of astrophysical environments, such as accretion flows around black holes, the intracluster medium, and the solar wind, are weakly collisional (or collisionless) and well magnetized. We present results from hybrid-kinetic simulations of turbulence relevant to these systems. Our low-beta simulations (where beta is the ratio of thermal and magnetic pressures) reproduce the observed preferential perpendicular ion heating and the development of non-thermal beams in the ion distribution function in the solar wind. Our high-beta simulations focus on the effects of kinetic micro-instabilities on the turbulent cascade, in particular, how they disrupt inertial-range Alfven waves and introduce an effective collisionality in otherwise collisionless plasma.