IFS Seminar

In this talk I will present our research program[0] that aims to build computational tools to understand the behavior of plasmas, from tokamak edge turbulence, to the plasma environment around planets, black-holes and neutron stars. For this, we have developed solvers and new extensions to (gyro)kinetic and multi-fluid models, including special and general-relativistic effects. For magnetized plasmas I will focus on two asymptotic models: the well-know gyrokinetic model, and the recently developed Parallel-Kinetic Perpendicular Moment[1] (PKPM) model. I will present results of applying the gyrokinetic solver to turbulence in the edge region of the D3D and TCV tokamaks, comparing positive and negative triangularity discharges. I will then show application of our kinetic and fluid solvers to understand fundamental processes of reconnection and current-sheet formation in planetary magnetospheres. Finally, I will describe our recent work in new approaches to special and general relativistic plasma multi-fluids[2] to properly simulate the extreme environments around black-holes and neutron stars[3]. I will conclude with a brief outline of a novel, "tetrads-first", non-canonical Hamiltonian formulation of general relativisitic kinetics, and very briefly mention the role of machine-learning in plasma physics[4,5].

 

Brief Bio:

Ammar Hakim is a Principal Research Physicist and the Deputy Head of the Computational Sciences Department at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. His research interests span all aspects of computational & theoretical plasma physics.