Production of thermal photons in viscous fluid dynamics with temperature-dependent shear viscosity

We compute the spectrum of thermal photons created in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV, taking into account dissipative corrections in production processes corresponding to the quark--gluon plasma and hadronic phases. To describe the evolution of the fireball we use a viscous fluid dynamic model with different parametrizations for the temperature--dependence of $\eta/s$. We find that the spectrum significantly depends on the values of $\eta/s$ in the QGP phase, and is almost insensitive to the values in the hadronic phase. We also compare the influence of the temperature--dependence of $\eta/s$ on the spectrum of thermal photons to that of using different equations of state in the fluid dynamic simulations, finding that both effects are of the same order of magnitude.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Features of collisionless turbulence in the intracluster medium from simulated Faraday Rotation maps

Observations of the intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters suggest for the presence of turbulence and the magnetic fields existence has been proved through observations of Faraday Rotation and synchrotron emission. The ICM is also known to be filled by a rarefied weakly collisional plasma. In this work we study the possible signatures left on Faraday Rotation maps by collisionless instabilities. For this purpose we use a numerical approach to investigate the dynamics of the turbulence in collisionless plasmas based on an magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) formalism taking into account different levels of pressure anisotropy. We consider models covering the sub/super-Alfv\'enic and trans/supersonic regimes, one of them representing the fiducial conditions corresponding to the ICM. From the simulated models we compute Faraday Rotation maps and analyze several statistical indicators in order to characterize the magnetic field structure and compare the results obtained with the collisionless model to those obtained using standard collisional MHD framework. We find that important imprints of the pressure anisotropy prevails in the magnetic field and also manifest in the associated Faraday Rotation maps which evidence smaller correlation lengths in the collisionless MHD case. These points are remarkably noticeable for the case mimicking the conditions prevailing in ICM. Nevertheless, in this study we have neglected the decrease of pressure anisotropy due to the feedback of the instabilities that naturally arise in collisionless plasmas at small scales. This decrease may not affect the statistical imprint differences described above, but should be examined elsewhere.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures, MNRAS accepte

Magnetothermal instabilities in magnetized anisotropic plasmas

Using the transport equations for an ideal anisotropic collisionless plasma derived from the Vlasov equation by the 16-moment method, we analyse the influence of pressure anisotropy exhibited by collisionless magnetized plasmas on the magnetothermal (MTI) and heat-flux-driven buoyancy (HBI) instabilities. We calculate the dispersion relation and the growth rates for these instabilities in the presence of a background heat flux and for configurations with static pressure anisotropy, finding that when the frequency at which heat conduction acts is much larger than any other frequency in the system (i.e. weak magnetic field) the pressure anisotropy has no effect on the MTI/HBI, provided the degree of anisotropy is small. In contrast, when this ordering of timescales does not apply the instability criteria depend on pressure anisotropy. Specifically, the growth time of the instabilities in the anisotropic case can be almost one order of magnitude smaller than its isotropic counterpart. We conclude that in plasmas where pressure anisotropy is present the MTI/HBI are modified. However, in environments with low magnetic fields and small anisotropy such as the ICM the results obtained from the 16-moment equations under the approximations considered are similar to those obtained from ideal MHD.Comment: v3: 16 pages, 2 figures, fixed typos, added references and a final note on related wor

The role of pressure anisotropy in the turbulent intracluster medium

In low-density plasma environments, such as the intracluster medium (ICM), the Larmour frequency is much larger than the ion-ion collision frequency. In such a case, the thermal pressure becomes anisotropic with respect to the magnetic field orientation and the evolution of the turbulent gas is more correctly described by a kinetic approach. A possible description of these collisionless scenarios is given by the so-called kinetic magnetohydrodynamic (KMHD) formalism, in which particles freely stream along the field lines, while moving with the field lines in the perpendicular direction. In this way a fluid-like behavior in the perpendicular plane is restored. In this work, we study fast growing magnetic fluctuations in the smallest scales which operate in the collisionless plasma that fills the ICM. In particular, we focus on the impact of a particular evolution of the pressure anisotropy and its implications for the turbulent dynamics of observables under the conditions prevailing in the ICM. We present results from numerical simulations and compare the results which those obtained using an MHD formalism.Comment: 7 pages, 14 figures, Journal of Physics: Conference Serie

Progressive transformation of a flux rope to an ICME

The solar wind conditions at one astronomical unit (AU) can be strongly disturbed by the interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). A subset, called magnetic clouds (MCs), is formed by twisted flux ropes that transport an important amount of magnetic flux and helicity which is released in CMEs. At 1 AU from the Sun, the magnetic structure of MCs is generally modeled neglecting their expansion during the spacecraft crossing. However, in some cases, MCs present a significant expansion. We present here an analysis of the huge and significantly expanding MC observed by the Wind spacecraft during 9 and 10 November, 2004. After determining an approximated orientation for the flux rope using the minimum variance method, we precise the orientation of the cloud axis relating its front and rear magnetic discontinuities using a direct method. This method takes into account the conservation of the azimuthal magnetic flux between the in- and out-bound branches, and is valid for a finite impact parameter (i.e., not necessarily a small distance between the spacecraft trajectory and the cloud axis). Moreover, using the direct method, we find that the ICME is formed by a flux rope (MC) followed by an extended coherent magnetic region. These observations are interpreted considering the existence of a previous larger flux rope, which partially reconnected with its environment in the front. These findings imply that the ejected flux rope is progressively peeled by reconnection and transformed to the observed ICME (with a remnant flux rope in the front part).Comment: Solar Physics (in press

Expansion of magnetic clouds in the outer heliosphere

A large amount of magnetized plasma is frequently ejected from the Sun as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Some of these ejections are detected in the solar wind as magnetic clouds (MCs) that have flux rope signatures. Magnetic clouds are structures that typically expand in the inner heliosphere. We derive the expansion properties of MCs in the outer heliosphere from one to five astronomical units to compare them with those in the inner heliosphere. We analyze MCs observed by the Ulysses spacecraft using insitu magnetic field and plasma measurements. The MC boundaries are defined in the MC frame after defining the MC axis with a minimum variance method applied only to the flux rope structure. As in the inner heliosphere, a large fraction of the velocity profile within MCs is close to a linear function of time. This is indicative of} a self-similar expansion and a MC size that locally follows a power-law of the solar distance with an exponent called zeta. We derive the value of zeta from the insitu velocity data. We analyze separately the non-perturbed MCs (cases showing a linear velocity profile almost for the full event), and perturbed MCs (cases showing a strongly distorted velocity profile). We find that non-perturbed MCs expand with a similar non-dimensional expansion rate (zeta=1.05+-0.34), i.e. slightly faster than at the solar distance and in the inner heliosphere (zeta=0.91+-0.23). The subset of perturbed MCs expands, as in the inner heliosphere, at a significantly lower rate and with a larger dispersion (zeta=0.28+-0.52) as expected from the temporal evolution found in numerical simulations. This local measure of the expansion also agrees with the distribution with distance of MC size,mean magnetic field, and plasma parameters. The MCs interacting with a strong field region, e.g. another MC, have the most variable expansion rate (ranging from compression to over-expansion)

A Helicity-Based Method to Infer the CME Magnetic Field Magnitude in Sun and Geospace: Generalization and Extension to Sun-Like and M-Dwarf Stars and Implications for Exoplanet Habitability

Patsourakos et al. (Astrophys. J. 817, 14, 2016) and Patsourakos and Georgoulis (Astron. Astrophys. 595, A121, 2016) introduced a method to infer the axial magnetic field in flux-rope coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the solar corona and farther away in the interplanetary medium. The method, based on the conservation principle of magnetic helicity, uses the relative magnetic helicity of the solar source region as input estimates, along with the radius and length of the corresponding CME flux rope. The method was initially applied to cylindrical force-free flux ropes, with encouraging results. We hereby extend our framework along two distinct lines. First, we generalize our formalism to several possible flux-rope configurations (linear and nonlinear force-free, non-force-free, spheromak, and torus) to investigate the dependence of the resulting CME axial magnetic field on input parameters and the employed flux-rope configuration. Second, we generalize our framework to both Sun-like and active M-dwarf stars hosting superflares. In a qualitative sense, we find that Earth may not experience severe atmosphere-eroding magnetospheric compression even for eruptive solar superflares with energies ~ 10^4 times higher than those of the largest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) X-class flares currently observed. In addition, the two recently discovered exoplanets with the highest Earth-similarity index, Kepler 438b and Proxima b, seem to lie in the prohibitive zone of atmospheric erosion due to interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs), except when they possess planetary magnetic fields that are much higher than that of Earth.Comment: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017SoPh..292...89