Physics

Dr Tulasi Parashar
University of Delaware

Abstract: Plasmas are ubiquitous in nature. Many astrophysical plasmas (e.g. Solar wind, galactic cooling flows, some black hole accretion disks and planetary magnetospheres) are observed or believed to be almost collisionless as well as in a turbulent state. Under such conditions, conventional fluid theories of plasma turbulence and dissipation become questionable. We provide a general overview of the field and discuss some of the recent results related to dissipation in collisionless plasmas, transition of turbulence from fluid to kinetic regimes as well as some astrophysical applications.