The basic physics of the processes playing the most important role in divertor plasma detachment is reviewed. The models used in the two-dimensional edge plasma transport codes that are widely used to address different issues of the edge plasma physics and to simulate the experimental data, as well as the numerical schemes and convergence issues, are described. The processes leading to ultimate divertor plasma detachment, the transition to and the stability of the detached regime, as well as the impact of the magnetic configuration and divertor geometry on detachment, are considered. A consistent, integral physical picture of ultimate detachment of a tokamak divertor plasma is developed.

This is a tutorial-style selective review explaining basic concepts of forced magnetic reconnection. It is based on a celebrated model of forced reconnection suggested by J. B. Taylor. The standard magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) theory of this process has been pioneered by Hahm & Kulsrud (Phys. Fluids, vol. 28, 1985, p. 2412). Here we also discuss several more recent developments related to this problem. These include energetics of forced reconnection, its Hall-mediated regime, and nonlinear effects with the associated onset of the secondary tearing (plasmoid) instability.

We review multiwavelength properties of pulsar wind nebulae created by supersonically moving pulsars and the effects of pulsar motion on the pulsar wind nebulae morphologies and the ambient medium. Supersonic pulsar wind nebulae are characterized by bow-shaped shocks around the pulsar and/or cometary tails filled with the shocked pulsar wind. In the past several years significant advances in supersonic pulsar wind nebula studies have been made in deep observations with the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope. In particular, these observations have revealed very diverse supersonic pulsar wind nebula morphologies in the pulsar vicinity, different spectral behaviours of long pulsar tails, the presence of puzzling outflows misaligned with the pulsar velocity and far-UV bow shocks. Here we review the current observational status focusing on recent developments and their implications.

One-dimensional self-consistent kinetic models may describe some states of intense charged particle beams. In the collisionless approximation, which is appropriate for the short current pulse duration, the kinetic distribution function may be built as a function of the motion integrals. Two situations are considered corresponding to the wide charged particle flux with the sharp front and to the sheet continuous beam freely propagating in space. In both cases, one-dimensional Vlasov equation solutions are shown to exist, which are based on algebraic functions of the motion invariants.

A long-standing problem in magnetic reconnection is to explain why it tends to proceed at or below a normalized rate of 0.1. This article gives a review of observational and numerical evidence for this rate and discusses recent theoretical work addressing this problem. Some remaining open questions are summarized.

Two signatures of quantum effects on radiation reaction in the collision of a ${\sim}$GeV electron beam with a high intensity (${>}3\times 10^{20}~\text{W}~\text{cm}^{-2}$) laser pulse have been considered. We show that the decrease in the average energy of the electron beam may be used to measure the Gaunt factor $g$ for synchrotron emission. We derive an equation for the evolution of the variance in the energy of the electron beam in the quantum regime, i.e. quantum efficiency parameter $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}\not \ll 1$. We show that the evolution of the variance may be used as a direct measure of the quantum stochasticity of the radiation reaction and determine the parameter regime where this is observable. For example, stochastic emission results in a 25 % increase in the standard deviation of the energy spectrum of a GeV electron beam, 1 fs after it collides with a laser pulse of intensity $10^{21}~\text{W}~\text{cm}^{-2}$. This effect should therefore be measurable using current high-intensity laser systems.

In this paper, we report a new type of instability of electron holes (EHs) interacting with passing ions. The nonlinear interaction of EHs and ions is investigated using a new theory of hole kinematics. It is shown that the oscillation in the velocity of the EH parallel to the magnetic field direction becomes unstable when the hole velocity in the ion frame is slower than a few times the cold ion sound speed. This instability leads to the emission of ion-acoustic waves from the solitary hole and decay in its magnitude. The instability mechanism can drive significant perturbations in the ion density. The instability threshold, oscillation frequency and instability growth rate derived from the theory yield quantitative agreement with the observations from a novel high-fidelity hole-tracking particle-in-cell code.

In this plasma model, consisting of ions and electrons with pressure variations in both the components in the presence of stationary dust, both compressive and rarefactive Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) solitons of interesting character are established. Based on high dust charge, characteristics of soliton growth are found to be amplified for various pairs of ion and electron streaming speeds. It is noteworthy to mention that for some pairs of ion and electron initial streaming speeds, only compressive KdV solitons with either decreasing or increasing growth are shown to reflect. Contrary to this, for some other pairs of ion and electron streaming speeds, the amplitudes of both rarefactive and compressive solitons are seen to be produced, changing from rarefactive to compressive growth. At the stationary background of the massive dust particles, the lighter particles suffer appreciable initial drifts (backwards streaming) which characteristically change the growth of solitons. For inclusion of higher-order nonlinearity, only compressive modified Korteweg–de Vries (MKdV) solitons of much higher amplitude are found to exist whereas for the same set of parameter values both compressive and rarefactive KdV solitons are found to exist. Smaller values of electron streaming speed are seen to produce high amplitude MKdV solitons. We also observe that due to higher-order nonlinearity, the nonlinear monotonic growth of amplitudes of MKdV solitons is supported by the almost equal streaming speed pairs of ions and electrons for relatively small values of $Z_{d}$, where $Z_{d}$ is the number of charges in a dust particle

Velocity distribution functions which feature extended tails with power-law dependence have been consistently observed in the solar wind environment and are frequently modelled by the so-called Kappa distributions. Different forms of Kappa distributions are commonly employed in analytical studies, and despite their similarities, they can produce different effects on the dispersion properties that occur in a plasma. We consider two different and widely used forms of Kappa distributions, in both isotropic and anisotropic cases, and systematically discuss their effects on the dispersion relations of Langmuir and ion-sound waves. It is shown that in the case of Langmuir waves, one of the forms leads to the expression for the Bohm–Gross dispersion relation, valid for plasmas with Maxwellian velocity distributions, while the other form of Kappa functions leads to a dispersion relation with significant difference regarding the Maxwellian case, particularly in the case of small values of the kappa index. For ion-sound waves, the dispersion relations obtained with the different forms of Kappa distributions are different among themselves, and also different from the Maxwellian case, with difference which increases for small values of the kappa index. Some results obtained from numerical solution of the dispersion relations are presented, which illustrate the magnitude of the perceived differences. Some results obtained with relativistic particle-in-cell simulations are also presented, which allow the comparison between the dispersion relations obtained from analytical calculations and the frequency–wavelength distribution of wave fluctuations which are observed in numerical experiments.

The two-dimensional Terry–Horton equation is shown to exhibit the Dimits shift when suitably modified to capture both the nonlinear enhancement of zonal/drift-wave interactions and the existence of residual Rosenbluth–Hinton states. This phenomenon persists through numerous simplifications of the equation, including a quasilinear approximation as well as a four-mode truncation. It is shown that the use of an appropriate adiabatic electron response, for which the electrons are not affected by the flux-averaged potential, results in an $\boldsymbol{E}\times \boldsymbol{B}$ nonlinearity that can efficiently transfer energy non-locally to length scales of the order of the sound radius. The size of the shift for the nonlinear system is heuristically calculated and found to be in excellent agreement with numerical solutions. The existence of the Dimits shift for this system is then understood as an ability of the unstable primary modes to efficiently couple to stable modes at smaller scales, and the shift ends when these stable modes eventually destabilize as the density gradient is increased. This non-local mechanism of energy transfer is argued to be generically important even for more physically complete systems.

The accumulation of impurities in the core of magnetically confined plasmas, resulting from standard collisional transport mechanisms, is a known threat to their performance as fusion energy sources. Whilst the axisymmetric tokamak systems have been shown to benefit from the effect of temperature screening, that is an outward flux of impurities driven by the temperature gradient, impurity accumulation in stellarators was thought to be inevitable, driven robustly by the inward pointing electric field characteristic of hot fusion plasmas. We have shown in Helander et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 118, 2017a, 155002) that such screening can in principle also appear in stellarators, in the experimentally relevant mixed collisionality regime, where a highly collisional impurity species is present in a low collisionality bulk plasma. Details of the analytic calculation are presented here, along with the effect of the impurity on the bulk ion flow, which will ultimately affect the bulk contribution to the bootstrap current.