Particle acceleration and turbulence in heliospheric plasmas

Research at Warwick University’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) focuses on plasma physics applied to the grand challenges of fusion energy, space physics, solar physics, and astrophysics. Our work spans fundamental theory, observation, and the analysis of experimental data, combined with high performance computing. For more details of the CFSA see http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/cfsa/

Current CFSA PhD students are supported financially from a broad range of sources in addition to the UK Research Councils EPSRC and STFC. At present these include Scholarships from the Governments of Chile and Mexico, Warwick Postgraduate Scholarships, and partnership arrangements with UK national laboratories. Active research collaborations with large facilities and space based missions are a distinctive feature of PhD research within CFSA.

The project: Astrophysical plasmas are observed to act as efficient particle accelerators, converting electromagnetic field energy into particle energy and heat. Fully non-linear fundamental plasma processes such as reconnection, shocks and turbulence are observed to accelerate the plasma, but these processes are yet to be fully understood. Open questions include how the solar wind is heated and whether this is the result of a universal mechanism, and how shocks increase entropy in the absence of collisions. The solar wind and planetary shocks offer a uniquely diagnosed natural observatory for these phenomena: in-situ satellite observations are available from sub-second timescales to that of the solar cycle. This project involves quantitative analysis of these datasets alongside modelling and simulation in order to further our understanding of the physics of these nonlinear phenomena and to quantify their role in plasma heating and particle acceleration.