725 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.
Using particle-in-cell simulations, this study demonstrates that non-linear electrostatic plasma instabilities in self-interacting dark matter subhalos orbiting the Milky Way can cause substantial turbulent heating and mass loss, potentially suppressing the low-mass subhalo population by up to 97% depending on orbital eccentricity.
This paper presents a validated two-temperature magnetohydrodynamic model demonstrating that electromagnetically driven centrifuges can achieve superior mass separation performance compared to traditional shear-driven centrifuges by optimizing the radial distribution of centrifugal strength rather than maximizing peak values, thereby overcoming previous limitations imposed by thermal dissipation.
This paper presents a computationally efficient Lagrangian model that unifies fully kinetic ions and gyrokinetic electrons within a consistent variational framework, utilizing higher-order Lie-transform perturbation methods to describe solar wind electromagnetic turbulence and derive self-consistent field equations.
This paper argues that the persistent temperature discrepancy between radio and ionization diagnostics in the quiet-Sun corona is not an error but a kinetic signature of a transported, power-law electron tail (with ) that stores significant thermal energy, lacks local conductive closure, and terminates at 1.8–3.5 keV, thereby transforming the disagreement into a precise measurement of the tail's shape, origin, and energy cutoff.
This paper demonstrates that the nonlinear saturation of neoclassical tearing modes in slab geometry can be directly predicted using the SPEC equilibrium solver based on a Taylor relaxation variational principle, offering a method that is orders of magnitude faster than resistive MHD simulations while maintaining high accuracy without fitting coefficients.
The authors present a non-empirical, Kohn-Sham-assisted orbital-free density functional theory framework that achieves Kohn-Sham-level accuracy for electronic structure calculations under extreme conditions while offering computational speedups of several hundred times compared to traditional methods.
This paper develops and validates a plane-wave expansion method to analyze linear ideal magnetohydrodynamic waves in a magneto-lattice, revealing how magnetic periodicity induces frequency band gaps, splits the Alfvén continuum, and enables the tailoring of wave propagation for applications in plasma metamaterials.
This paper demonstrates that the relative phase between two spatiotemporally inhomogeneous electric fields controls multi-photon electron-positron pair creation from the vacuum, where the resulting periodicity in transition probability for -photon processes provides a distinct signature for identifying the order of these quantum transitions.
This paper presents experimental validation of the constrained plasma dynamics hypothesis by observing poloidal magnetic flux emission from low-pressure sparks, suggesting that neglected electron inertia terms are crucial for accurate plasma modeling and could explain phenomena like astrophysical jet magnetic fields.
This paper formulates magnetic mirror design as a PDE-constrained optimization problem using a multispecies drift-kinetic-Poisson model, revealing that self-consistent electric fields and kinetic effects fundamentally alter optimal confinement strategies beyond classical loss-cone theory.