534 papers
Plasma physics explores the behavior of the fourth state of matter, a superheated soup of charged particles that makes up most of the visible universe. From the fusion power we hope to harness on Earth to the glowing auroras and distant stars above, this field investigates how these energetic gases interact with magnetic fields and light. It is a dynamic area where extreme conditions reveal fundamental laws of nature in ways solid matter never can.
At Gist.Science, we bridge the gap between these complex discoveries and curious minds by processing every new preprint from arXiv in this category. We transform dense, technical research into clear, plain-language explanations alongside detailed summaries, ensuring that breakthroughs in plasma dynamics and fusion energy are accessible to everyone. Below are the latest papers in plasma physics, curated and simplified for your reading.
This paper investigates the properties of a plasma sheath containing cold positive ions, secondary electrons, and primary electrons with a non-thermal Cairns distribution, deriving new criteria for the Bohm speed, floating potential, and critical secondary electron emission coefficient that differ significantly from Maxwellian-based models due to the influence of the non-thermal parameter.
This paper demonstrates that accelerating the semi-implicit energy-conserving PIC code ECsim with OpenACC on the Leonardo supercomputer achieves a 5× speedup and 3× energy reduction compared to CPU execution, while maintaining high scaling efficiency up to 1024 GPUs.
This paper confirms the existence of a new bulk medium quasiparticle, the spatiotemporal optical vortex polariton, which possesses transverse orbital angular momentum driven by ponderomotive torques from the magnetic Lorentz force, with theoretical predictions validated by particle-in-cell simulations across various densities and field strengths.
This study utilizes a data-constrained, resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulation to demonstrate that a non-force-free initial magnetic field, characterized by a Lorentz force imbalance, can spontaneously trigger the formation and subsequent eruption of a flux rope in active region NOAA 12241 without requiring pre-existing structures or photospheric driving motions.
This paper derives a reduced one-fluid plasma model from the relativistic Vlasov-Boltzmann-Maxwell system using moment hierarchy reduction and strong-guide-field ordering, resulting in a closed GENERIC framework that unifies reversible electromagnetic dynamics with irreversible thermodynamic relaxation through a scalar regulator variable representing coarse-grained charge imbalance and pressure anisotropy.
Using fully kinetic Particle In Cell simulations, this study demonstrates that tailored plasma density profiles can sustain autoresonant beat wave excitation to generate long-lasting, high-amplitude plasma structures with controlled wave packet shapes and group velocities, offering a viable alternative to laser frequency chirping for applications in plasma photonics.
This paper reports a laboratory measurement demonstrating that while low concentrations of impurities do not affect Coulomb crystallization thresholds in laser-cooled ion crystals, sufficiently high concentrations induce a linear shift due to local pinning, providing critical experimental data to refine models of multicomponent Coulomb matter in stellar environments like white dwarfs and neutron stars.
This paper presents a comprehensive cold-fluid analysis of the Weibel instability across non-relativistic and relativistic, single- and multi-species regimes, deriving scaling laws that accurately predict filament spacing and magnetic field saturation in both laboratory laser experiments and MMS spacecraft observations of astrophysical shocks.
This study utilizes the RAPTOR code to demonstrate that the timescale for controlled termination of Ohmic tokamak plasmas scales with the inductive time constant , revealing that while ramping down faster than this limit induces adverse current profile reversals, the reduced plasma volume and elongation in reactor-grade devices like ITER and DEMO may enable faster, stable termination scenarios.
This paper presents the first comprehensive full-f drift-kinetic and -f gyrokinetic simulations of the LAPD linear plasma device, revealing that ion distributions are approximately bi-Maxwellian and that Kelvin-Helmholtz-driven turbulence dominates the system, with small-scale structures only significantly amplified under reduced collisionality and enhanced source conditions.