We simulate the dynamics, including laser cooling, of three-dimensional (3-D) ion crystals confined in a Penning trap using a newly developed molecular dynamics-like code. The numerical integration of the ions’ equations of motion is accelerated using the fast multipole method to calculate the Coulomb interaction between ions, which allows us to efficiently study large ion crystals with thousands of ions. In particular, we show that the simulation time scales linearly with ion number, rather than with the square of the ion number. By treating the ions’ absorption of photons as a Poisson process, we simulate individual photon scattering events to study laser cooling of 3-D ellipsoidal ion crystals. Initial simulations suggest that these crystals can be efficiently cooled to ultracold temperatures, aided by the mixing of the easily cooled axial motional modes with the low frequency planar modes. In our simulations of a spherical crystal of 1000 ions, the planar kinetic energy is cooled to several millikelvin in a few milliseconds while the axial kinetic energy and total potential energy are cooled even further. This suggests that 3-D ion crystals could be well suited as platforms for future quantum science experiments.

Dusty plasmas typically contain various species of dust particles, though most studies have focused on homogeneous systems. This paper investigates the propagation of dust acoustic waves in an inhomogeneous dusty plasma with an interface, analysing how plasma inhomogeneity influences wave behaviour. Using scattering and reductive perturbation methods, we show that both transmitted and reflected waves depend strongly on the mass ratio between regions. Dust acoustic waves cannot propagate through a dust lattice when the wavelength is smaller than the lattice constant. At a discontinuous interface, at least one transmitted solitary wave is generated, with its amplitude determined by the mass ratio, while at most one reflected solitary wave can exist. These results underscore the critical role of the mass ratio in wave propagation and suggest a method for estimating dust particle masses and properties by analysing the incident, transmitted and reflected waves.

We provide a fundamentally new perspective on subcritical turbulence in plasmas, based on coherent structures, which are obtained and characterised via direct numerical solution. The domains where these coherent states exist appear to be closely connected to the those where related turbulent states can exist, so there may be a deep connection between the stability of these coherent structures and the domain where sustained turbulence is possible. In contrast to previous descriptions of turbulence in terms of a stochastic collection of linear waves, we present a fundamentally nonlinear representation based on more general classes of translating oscillatory nonlinear solutions. In turbulent tokamak plasmas, the transport can often be completely suppressed by introducing a background shear flow, whose amplitude is an important control parameter. As this parameter is decreased below a critical value, radially localised structures appear, becoming larger and more complex, in both gyrokinetic simulations and a simpler fluid model of the plasma. For the fluid model, we directly solve for a particular class of nonlinear solutions, relative periodic orbits, and determine their stability, thus explaining why these isolated structures appear in initial-value simulations. The increase of complexity as the flow shear is reduced is explained by a series of Hopf bifurcations of these nonlinear solutions, which we quantify via stability analysis. In gyrokinetic simulations, we are able to indirectly determine the underlying relative periodic orbits by imposing symmetry conditions on the simulations.

This paper presents a novel approach for simulating plasma instabilities in tokamak plasmas using the piecewise field-aligned finite element method in combination with the particle-in-cell method. Our method traditionally aligns the computational grid, but defines the basis functions in piecewise field-aligned coordinates to avoid grid deformation while naturally representing the field-aligned mode structures. This scheme is formulated and implemented numerically. It also applies to the unstructured triangular meshes in principle. We have conducted linear benchmark tests, which agree well with previous results and traditional schemes. Furthermore, multiple-$n$ simulations are also carried out as a proof of principle, demonstrating the efficiency of this scheme in nonlinear turbulence simulations within the framework of the finite element method.

We analyse distributions of the spatial scales of coherent intermittent structures – current sheets – obtained from fully kinetic, two-dimensional simulations of relativistic turbulence in a collisionless pair plasma using unsupervised machine-learning data dissection. We find that the distribution functions of sheet length $\ell$ (longest scale of the analysed structure in the direction perpendicular to the dominant guide field) and curvature $r_c$ (radius of a circle fitted to the structures) can be well-approximated by power-law distributions, indicating self-similarity of the structures. The distribution for the sheet width $w$ (shortest scale of the structure) peaks at the kinetic scales and decays exponentially at larger values. The data shows little or no correlation between $w$ and $\ell$, as expected from theoretical considerations. The typical $r_c$ depends linearly on $\ell$, which indicates that the sheets all have a similar curvature relative to their sizes. We find a weak correlation between $r_c$ and $w$. Our results can be used to inform realistic magnetohydrodynamic subgrid models for plasma turbulence in high-energy astrophysics.

We present a quantum algorithm based on repeated measurement to solve initial-value problems for nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs), which may be generated from partial differential equations in plasma physics. We map a dynamical system to a Hamiltonian form, where the Hamiltonian matrix is a function of dynamical variables. To advance in time, we measure expectation values from the previous time step and evaluate the Hamiltonian function classically, which introduces stochasticity into the dynamics. We then perform standard quantum Hamiltonian simulation over a short time, using the evaluated constant Hamiltonian matrix. This approach requires evolving an ensemble of quantum states, which are consumed each step to measure the required observables. We apply this approach to the classic logistic and Lorenz systems, in both integrable and chaotic regimes. Our analysis shows that the solutions’ accuracy is influenced by both the stochastic sampling rate and the nature of the dynamical system.

The change in direction of the wavevector and group velocity experienced by a wave refracted at the interface of an anisotropic medium in uniform linear motion are determined analytically. These transmission conditions, which are shown to be consistent with the generalised Snell’s law written in the laboratory frame, are then used to examine the effect of motion on waves incident on a magnetised plasma. For an incident wave in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field the motion is observed to lead to non-negligible deviation of the low-frequency X-mode, as well as to non-symmetrical total reflection angles. These effects are shown to be further complicated when the magnetic field is in the plane formed by the incident wavevector and the medium’s velocity, as the anisotropy now competes with the motion-induced drag. Although obtained in simplified configurations, these results suggest that accounting for motion when modelling plasma wave trajectories could be important under certain conditions, calling for a more detailed quantification of the effect of motion in actual diagnostics and plasma control schemes.

A charged particle in a suitably strong magnetic field spirals along the field lines while slowly drifting transversely. This note provides a brief derivation of an effective Lagrangian formulation for the guiding-centre approximation that captures this dynamics without resolving the gyro motion. It also explains how the effective Lagrangian may, for special magnetic fields, admit a ‘quasi-symmetry’ which can give rise to a conserved quantity helpful for plasma confinement in fields lacking a geometric isometry. The aim of this note is to offer a pedagogical introduction and some perspectives on this well-established subject.

High-beta magnetised plasmas often exhibit anomalously structured temperature profiles, as seen from galaxy cluster observations and recent experiments. It is well known that when such plasmas are collisionless, temperature gradients along the magnetic field can excite whistler waves that efficiently scatter electrons to limit their heat transport. Only recently has it been shown that parallel temperature gradients can excite whistler waves also in collisional plasmas. Here, we develop a Wigner–Moyal theory for the collisional whistler instability starting from Braginskii-like fluid equations in a slab geometry. This formalism is necessary because, for a large region in parameter space, the fastest-growing whistler waves have wavelengths comparable to the background temperature gradients. We find additional damping terms in the expression for the instability growth rate involving inhomogeneous Nernst advection and resistivity. They (i) enable whistler waves to re-arrange the electron temperature profile via growth, propagation and subsequent dissipation, and (ii) allow non-constant temperature profiles to exist stably. For high-beta plasmas, the marginally stable solutions take the form of a temperature staircase along the magnetic field lines. The electron heat flux can also be suppressed by the Ettingshausen effect when the whistler intensity profile is sufficiently peaked and oriented opposite the background temperature gradient. This mechanism allows cold fronts without magnetic draping, might reduce parallel heat losses in inertial fusion experiments and generally demonstrates that whistler waves can regulate transport even in the collisional limit.

Landau damping is one of the cornerstones of plasma physics. Based on the initial-value approach adopted by Landau in his original derivation of Landau damping, we examine the solutions of the linear Vlasov–Poisson system for different equilibrium distribution functions $f_0(v)$, going beyond the traditional focus on the root with largest imaginary part and investigating the full set of roots that the dispersion relation of the system generally admits. Specifically, we provide analytical insights into the number and the structure of the roots for entire and meromorphic functions $f_0(v)$, such as Maxwellian and $\kappa$ distributions, we discuss the potential issues related to the redefinition of $\partial{f}_0/\partial{v}$ as a complex variable function and we show how different sigmoids affect the root structure associated with non-meromorphic cut-off distribution functions. Finally, based on the comparison of the several root structures considered, we wonder if the multiple roots might hint at a deeper understanding of the Landau damping phenomenon.