Thermal disequilibration of ions and electrons by collisionless plasma turbulence.

Does overall thermal equilibrium exist between ions and electrons in a weakly collisional, magnetized, turbulent plasma? And, if not, how is thermal energy partitioned between ions and electrons? This is a fundamental question in plasma physics, the answer to which is also crucial for predicting the properties of far-distant astronomical objects such as accretion disks around black holes. In the context of disks, this question was posed nearly two decades ago and has since generated a sizeable literature. Here we provide the answer for the case in which energy is injected into the plasma via Alfvénic turbulence: Collisionless turbulent heating typically acts to disequilibrate the ion and electron temperatures. Numerical simulations using a hybrid fluid-gyrokinetic model indicate that the ion-electron heating-rate ratio is an increasing function of the thermal-to-magnetic energy ratio, [Formula: see text]: It ranges from [Formula: see text] at [Formula: see text] to at least 30 for [Formula: see text] This energy partition is approximately insensitive to the ion-to-electron temperature ratio [Formula: see text] Thus, in the absence of other equilibrating mechanisms, a collisionless plasma system heated via Alfvénic turbulence will tend toward a nonequilibrium state in which one of the species is significantly hotter than the other, i.e., hotter ions at high [Formula: see text] and hotter electrons at low [Formula: see text] Spectra of electromagnetic fields and the ion distribution function in 5D phase space exhibit an interesting new magnetically dominated regime at high [Formula: see text] and a tendency for the ion heating to be mediated by nonlinear phase mixing ("entropy cascade") when [Formula: see text] and by linear phase mixing (Landau damping) when [Formula: see text].

Modification of magnetohydrodynamic waves by the relativistic Hall effect.

This study shows that a relativistic Hall effect significantly changes the properties of wave propagation by deriving a linear dispersion relation for relativistic Hall magnetohydrodynamics (HMHD). Whereas, in nonrelativistic HMHD, the phase and group velocities of fast magnetosonic wave become anisotropic with an increasing Hall effect, the relativistic Hall effect brings upper bounds to the anisotropies. The Alfvén wave group velocity with strong Hall effect also becomes less anisotropic than the nonrelativistic case. Moreover, the group velocity surfaces of Alfvén and fast waves coalesce into a single surface in the direction other than near perpendicular to the ambient magnetic field. It is also remarkable that a characteristic scale length of the relativistic HMHD depends on ion temperature, magnetic field strength, and density while the nonrelativistic HMHD scale length, i.e., ion skin depth, depends only on density. The modified characteristic scale length increases as the ion temperature increases and decreases as the magnetic field strength increases.