This review of scaling theories of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence aims to put the developments of the last few years in the context of the canonical time line (from Kolmogorov to Iroshnikov–Kraichnan to Goldreich–Sridhar to Boldyrev). It is argued that Beresnyak's (valid) objection that Boldyrev's alignment theory, at least in its original form, violates the Reduced-MHD rescaling symmetry can be reconciled with alignment if the latter is understood as an intermittency effect. Boldyrev's scalings, a version of which is recovered in this interpretation, and the concept of dynamic alignment (equivalently, local 3D anisotropy) are thus an example of a physical theory of intermittency in a turbulent system. The emergence of aligned structures naturally brings into play reconnection physics and thus the theory of MHD turbulence becomes intertwined with the physics of tearing, current-sheet disruption and plasmoid formation. Recent work on these subjects by Loureiro, Mallet et al. is reviewed and it is argued that we may, as a result, finally have a reasonably complete picture of the MHD turbulent cascade (forced, balanced, and in the presence of a strong mean field) all the way to the dissipation scale. This picture appears to reconcile Beresnyak's advocacy of the Kolmogorov scaling of the dissipation cutoff (as $\mathrm {Re}^{3/4}$) with Boldyrev's aligned cascade. It turns out also that these ideas open the door to some progress in understanding MHD turbulence without a mean field – MHD dynamo – whose saturated state is argued to be controlled by reconnection and to contain, at small scales, a tearing-mediated cascade similar to its strong-mean-field counterpart (this is a new result). On the margins of this core narrative, standard weak-MHD-turbulence theory is argued to require some adjustment – and a new scheme for such an adjustment is proposed – to take account of the determining part that a spontaneously emergent 2D condensate plays in mediating the Alfvén-wave cascade from a weakly interacting state to a strongly turbulent (critically balanced) one. This completes the picture of the MHD cascade at large scales. A number of outstanding issues are surveyed: imbalanced turbulence (for which a new, tentative theory is proposed), residual energy, MHD turbulence at subviscous scales, and decaying MHD turbulence (where there has been dramatic progress recently, and reconnection again turned out to feature prominently). Finally, it is argued that the natural direction of research is now away from the fluid MHD theory and into kinetic territory – and then, possibly, back again. The review lays no claim to objectivity or completeness, focusing on topics and views that the author finds most appealing at the present moment.

In the presence of a stationary gravitomagnetic field, a weakly rotating self-gravitating fluid relaxes into equilibrium flow configurations which admit both large- and small-scale structures. Unlike the traditional Beltrami equilibria in fluid, the equilibrium states in a rotating self-gravitating fluid in a gravitomagnetic field have structure similar to that of double curl Beltrami equilibria in plasma where the generalized vortical lines are aligned with the flow field. Different equilibrium flow configurations in the rotating fluid can be distinguished by the ratio between total energy and helicity. However, these fluid equilibria do not exhibit diamagnetic behaviours as observed in multi-species plasma equilibria.

We study the stability problem of a magnetohydrodynamic current sheet with the presence of a plasma jet. The flow direction is perpendicular to the normal of the current sheet and we analyse two cases: (1) the flow is along the antiparallel component of the magnetic field; (2) the flow is perpendicular to the antiparallel component of the magnetic field. A generalized equation set with the condition of incompressibility is derived and solved as a boundary value problem. For the first case we show that the streaming kink mode is stabilized by the magnetic field at $V_0/B_0 \lesssim 2$, where $V_0$ and $B_0$ are the jet speed and upstream Alfvén speed, and it is not affected by resistivity significantly. The streaming sausage mode is stabilized at $V_0/B_0 \lesssim 1$, and it can transit to the streaming tearing mode with a finite resistivity. The streaming tearing mode has larger growth rate than the pure tearing mode, though the scaling relation between the maximum growth rate and the Lundquist number remains unchanged. When the jet is perpendicular to the antiparallel component of the magnetic field, the most unstable sausage mode is usually perpendicular (wavevector along the jet) without a guide field. But with a finite guide field, the most unstable sausage mode can be oblique, depending on the jet speed and guide field strength.

Effects of plasma non-uniformities and kinetic dispersiveness on the spontaneous excitation of geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) by reversed shear Alfvén eigenmode (RSAE) are investigated numerically. It is found that, due to the turning points induced by the shear Alfvén continuum structure, the nonlinear excitation of GAM is a quasiexponentially growing absolute instability. As the radial dependence of GAM frequency and pump RSAE mode structure are accounted for, the radially inward propagating GAM is preferentially excited, leading to core localized thermal plasma heating by GAM collisionless damping. Our work, thus, suggests that GAM excitation plays a crucial role in not only RSAE nonlinear saturation, but also anomalous fuel ion heating in future reactors.

We carry out three-dimensional and two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of the expansion of a magnetized plasma that initially uniformly fills a half-space and contains a semicylindrical region of heated electrons elongated along the surface of the plasma boundary. This geometry is related, for instance, to ablation of a plane target by a femtosecond laser beam under quasi-cylindrical focusing. We find that a decay of the inhomogeneous plasma–vacuum discontinuity is strongly affected by an external magnetic field parallel to its boundary. We observe various transient phenomena, including an anisotropic scattering of electrons and an accompanying Weibel instability, and reveal various spatial structures of the arising magnetic field and current, including multiple flying-apart filaments of a Z-pinch type and slowly evolving current sheets with different orientations. The magnitude of the self-generated magnetic field can be of the order of, or significantly exceed that of, the external one. Such phenomena are expected in the laser and cosmic plasmas, including the explosive processes in the planetary magnetospheres and stellar coronal arches.

We study the effect of negatively charged dust on the magnetic-field-aligned polarisation electrostatic field ($\boldsymbol {E}_{\parallel }$) using Cassini's RPWS/LP in situ measurements during the ‘ring-grazing’ orbits. We derive a general expression for $\boldsymbol {E}_{\parallel }$ and estimate for the first time in situ $\lVert \boldsymbol {E}_{\parallel } \rVert$ (approximately $10^{-5} \, \text {V}\, \text {m}^{-1}$) near the Janus and Epimetheus rings. We further demonstrate that the presence of the negatively charged dust close to the ring plane ($\vert \text {Z} \vert \lesssim 0.11 \, \text {R}_{s}$) amplifies $\lVert \boldsymbol {E}_{\parallel } \rVert$ by at least one order of magnitude and reverses its direction due to the effect of the charged dust gravitational and inertial forces. Such reversal confines the electrons at the magnetic equator within the dusty region, around $0.047 \, \text {R}_{s}$ above the ring plane. Furthermore, we discuss the role of the collision terms, in particular the ion–dust drag force, in amplifying $\boldsymbol {E}_{\parallel }$. These results imply that the charged dust, as small as nanometres in size, can have a significant influence on the plasma transport, in particular ambipolar diffusion along the magnetic field lines, and so their presence must be taken into account when studying such dynamical processes.

The topological Langmuir-cyclotron wave (TLCW) is a recently identified topological surface excitation in magnetized plasmas. We show that TLCW originates from the topological phase transition at the Langmuir wave-cyclotron wave resonance. By isofrequency surface analysis and two- and three-dimensional time-dependent simulations, we demonstrate that the TLCW can propagate robustly along complex phase transition interfaces in a unidirectional manner and without scattering. Because of these desirable features, the TLCW could be explored as an effective mechanism to drive current and flow in magnetized plasmas. The analysis also establishes a close connection between the newly instituted topological phase classification of plasmas and the classical Clemmow-Mullaly-Allis (CMA) diagram of plasma waves.

In this paper we propose a methodology for the efficient implementation of machine learning (ML)-based methods in particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, with a focus on Monte Carlo or statistical extensions to the PIC algorithm. The presented approach allows for neural networks to be developed in a Python environment, where advanced ML tools are readily available to proficiently train and test them. Those models are then efficiently deployed within highly scalable and fully parallelized PIC simulations during runtime. We demonstrate this methodology with a proof-of-concept implementation within the PIC code OSIRIS, where a fully connected neural network is used to replace a section of a Compton scattering module. We demonstrate that the ML-based method reproduces the results obtained with the conventional method and achieves better computational performance. These results offer a promising avenue for future applications of ML-based methods in PIC, particularly for physics extensions where a ML-based approach can provide a higher performance increase.

We report a generation of energetic protons by the interaction of a high-energy electron driving beam with an underdense plasma slab. After an interaction period of approximately 4000 fs, a proton beam with maximum energy greater than 250 MeV can be achieved by applying a driving beam with energy 1.0 GeV to a 200 $\mathrm {\mu }$m plasma slab. Our two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations also show that the proton acceleration process can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, a strong positive longitudinal electric field appears near the rear boundary of the plasma slab after the driving beam has passed through it. This acceleration process is similar to the target normal sheath acceleration scheme by the interaction between intense pulsed laser with overdense plasma targets. In the second stage, the accelerated protons experience a long-range acceleration process with a two-stream instability between the high-energy driving beam and the proton beam. Further analyses show that this accelerated proton beam is equipped with the property of good collimation and high energy. This scheme presents a new way for proton or ion acceleration on some special occasions.

Sufficient conditions are found on the ion velocity distribution $f_i$ and potential amplitude for stability of steady electron holes moving at slow speeds, coinciding with the bulk of $f_i$. Fully establishing stability requires calculation of the ion response to shift potential perturbations having an entire range of oscillatory frequencies, because under some conditions real frequencies intermediate between the ion and electron responses prove to be unstable even when the extremes are not. The mechanism of this overstability is explained and calculated in detail. Electron holes of peak potential $\psi$ less than approximately 0.01 times the background temperature ($\psi \lesssim 0.01T_0/e$) avoid the oscillatory instability entirely. For them, the necessary condition that there be a local minimum in $f_i$ in which the hole resides is also sufficient, unless the magnetic field $B$ is low enough to permit the transverse instability having finite wavenumber $k$ perpendicular to $B$.

We examine the turbulence driven by the ion and electron temperature gradients in selected magnetic configurations of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator. The inherent flexibility in the configuration space of W7-X enables us to find candidate configurations manifesting low turbulent transport. We follow insights gained by stellarator optimization techniques, in order to identify key geometric features, which are directly related to the ion and electron heat fluxes produced by plasma turbulence. One such a feature is the flux expansion at locations where the curvature is particularly unfavourable. Starting from a configuration routinely used in the W7-X experiment, we end up with an optimized configuration. Based on this equilibrium, we select a configuration from W7-X configuration database with a similar feature as the optimized one. With the help of nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, we show that the heat flux in this configuration is less stiff than in the initial configuration, both for ion temperature gradient and electron temperature gradient turbulence.

First-order-accurate degenerate variational integration (DVI) was introduced in Ellison et al. (Phys. Plasmas, vol. 25, 2018, 052502) for systems with a degenerate Lagrangian, i.e. one in which the velocity-space Hessian is singular. In this paper we introduce second-order-accurate DVI schemes, both with and without non-uniform time stepping. We show that it is not in general possible to construct a second-order scheme with a preserved two-form by composing a first-order scheme with its adjoint, and discuss the conditions under which such a composition is possible. We build two classes of second-order-accurate DVI schemes. We test these second-order schemes numerically on two systems having non-canonical variables, namely the magnetic field line and guiding centre systems. Variational integration for Hamiltonian systems with non-uniform time steps, in terms of an extended phase space Hamiltonian, is generalized to non-canonical variables. It is shown that preservation of proper degeneracy leads to single-step (one-step) methods without parasitic modes, i.e. to non-uniform time step DVIs. This extension applies to second-order-accurate as well as first-order schemes, and can be applied to adapt the time stepping to an error estimate.

The gap between a recently developed dynamical version of relaxed magnetohydrodynamics (RxMHD) and ideal MHD (IMHD) is bridged by approximating the zero-resistivity ‘ideal’ Ohm's law (IOL) constraint using an augmented Lagrangian method borrowed from optimization theory. The augmentation combines a pointwise vector Lagrange multiplier method and global penalty function method and can be used either for iterative enforcement of the IOL to arbitrary accuracy, or for constructing a continuous sequence of magnetofluid dynamics models running between RxMHD (no IOL) and weak IMHD (IOL almost everywhere). This is illustrated by deriving dispersion relations for linear waves on an MHD equilibrium.

A particle-in-cell algorithm is derived with a canonical Poisson structure in the formalism of finite element exterior calculus. The resulting method belongs to the class of gauge-compatible splitting algorithms, which exactly preserve gauge symmetries and their associated conservation laws via the momentum map. We numerically demonstrate this time invariance of the momentum map and its usefulness in establishing precise initial conditions with a desired initial electric field and fixed background charge. The restriction of this canonical, finite element Poisson structure to the 1X2P $1\frac {1}{2}$-dimensional phase space is also considered and simulated numerically.

Dissipative processes cause collisionless plasmas in many systems to develop non-thermal particle distributions with broad power-law tails. The prevalence of power-law energy distributions in space/astrophysical observations and kinetic simulations of systems with a variety of acceleration and trapping (or escape) mechanisms poses a deep mystery. We consider the possibility that such distributions can be modelled from maximum-entropy principles, when accounting for generalizations beyond the Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy. Using a dimensional representation of entropy (related to the Renyi and Tsallis entropies), we derive generalized maximum-entropy distributions with a power-law tail determined by the characteristic energy scale at which irreversible dissipation occurs. By assuming that particles are typically energized by an amount comparable to the free energy (per particle) before equilibrating, we derive a formula for the power-law index as a function of plasma parameters for magnetic dissipation in systems with sufficiently complex topologies. The model reproduces several results from kinetic simulations of relativistic turbulence and magnetic reconnection.

Plasma jets are widely investigated both in the laboratory and in nature. Astrophysical objects such as black holes, active galactic nuclei and young stellar objects commonly emit plasma jets in various forms. With the availability of data from plasma jet experiments resembling astrophysical plasma jets, classification of such data would potentially aid in not only investigating the underlying physics of the experiments but also the study of astrophysical jets. In this work we use deep learning to process all of the laboratory plasma images from the Caltech Spheromak Experiment spanning two decades. We found that cosine similarity can aid in feature selection, classify images through comparison of feature vector direction and be used as a loss function for the training of AlexNet for plasma image classification. We also develop a simple vector direction comparison algorithm for binary and multi-class classification. Using our algorithm we demonstrate 93 % accurate binary classification to distinguish unstable columns from stable columns and 92 % accurate five-way classification of a small, labelled data set which includes three classes corresponding to varying levels of kink instability.

Weakly collisional plasmas are subject to nonlinear relaxation processes, which can operate at rates much faster than the particle collision frequencies. This causes the plasma to respond like a magnetised fluid despite having long particle mean free paths. In this Letter the effective collisional mechanisms are modelled in the plasma kinetic equation to produce density, pressure and magnetic-field responses to compare with spacecraft measurements of the solar wind compressive fluctuations at 1 AU. This enables a measurement of the effective mean free path of the solar wind protons, found to be ${\approx }4 \times 10^{5}$ km, which is approximately $10^{3}$ times shorter than the collisional mean free path. These measurements are shown to support the effective fluid behaviour of the solar wind at scales above the proton gyroradius and demonstrate that effective collision processes alter the thermodynamics and transport of weakly collisional plasmas.

Three machine learning techniques (multilayer perceptron, random forest and Gaussian process) provide fast surrogate models for lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) simulations. A single GENRAY/CQL3D simulation without radial diffusion of fast electrons requires several minutes of wall-clock time to complete, which is acceptable for many purposes, but too slow for integrated modelling and real-time control applications. The machine learning models use a database of more than 16 000 GENRAY/CQL3D simulations for training, validation and testing. Latin hypercube sampling methods ensure that the database covers the range of nine input parameters ($n_{e0}$, $T_{e0}$, $I_p$, $B_t$, $R_0$, $n_{\|}$, $Z_{{\rm eff}}$, $V_{{\rm loop}}$ and $P_{{\rm LHCD}}$) with sufficient density in all regions of parameter space. The surrogate models reduce the inference time from minutes to $\sim$ms with high accuracy across the input parameter space.

Collisionless shocks undergo structural changes with the increase of Mach number. Observations and numerical simulations indicate development of time-dependent rippling. It is not known at present what causes the rippling. However, effects of such rippling on the field pattern and ion motion and distributions can be studied without precise knowledge of the causes and detailed shape. It is shown that deviations of the normal component of the magnetic field from the constant value indicate certain spatial dependence of the rippling. Deviations of the motional electric field from the constant value indicate time dependence. It is argued that whistler waves should propagate towards upstream and downstream regions from the rippled ramp. It is shown that the downstream pattern of the fields and ion distributions should follow the rippling pattern, while collisionless relaxation should be faster than in the stationary planar case.

In a magnetised plasma on scales well above ion kinetic scales, any constant-magnitude magnetic field, accompanied by parallel Alfvénic flows, forms a nonlinear solution in an isobaric, constant-density background. These structures, which are also known as spherically polarised Alfvén waves, are observed ubiquitously in the solar wind, presumably created by the growth of small-amplitude fluctuations as they propagate outwards in the corona. Here, we present a computational method to construct such solutions of arbitrary amplitude with general multidimensional structure, and explore some of their properties. The difficulty lies in computing a zero-divergence, constant-magnitude magnetic field, which leaves a single, quasi-free function to define the solution, while requiring strong constraints on any individual component of the field. Motivated by the physical process of wave growth in the solar wind, our method circumvents this issue by starting from low-amplitude Alfvénic fluctuations dominated by a strong mean field, then ‘growing’ magnetic perturbations into the large-amplitude regime. We present example solutions with non-trivial structure in one, two and three dimensions, demonstrating a clear tendency to form very sharp gradients or discontinuities, unless the solution is one-dimensional. As well as being useful as an input for other calculations, particularly the study of parametric decay, our results provide a natural explanation for the extremely sharp field discontinuities observed across magnetic field switchbacks in the low solar wind.