Before working with me and my collaborators it is important that you know what you are getting yourself into. To get a feeling for the kind of work you will be doing, try these two problems on the attached problem sheet. Email them back to me and we can discuss. I am happy to work with students on any of the projects below:
Dr. James Beattie, Prof. Bart Ripperda (CITA) and Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton University)
August 2024
Reconnection and dynamo are fundamentally opposite plasma processes - reconnection describing the conversion of magnetic energy density into kinetic, and dynamo conversion of kinetic energy density …
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Dr. James Beattie
August 2024
Star formation happens within cold molecular clouds which are subject to supersonic turbulent motions and strong magnetic fields. The gas density PDF of such a medium has been previously used to …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Mark Krumholz (Australian National University)
August 2024
Cosmic rays are charged, relativistic particles that pervade the galaxy at similar total energy densities as the magnetic fields and even the kinetic turbulent energies. The most common in number …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton University)
August 2024
The saturation of the turbulent dynamo remains a highly important, outstanding problem for all small-scale dynamo theories. Beattie, et al. (2023a) showed numerically that the saturation is completely …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton University)
August 2024
The turbulent magnetic field that is grown and maintained in our Galaxy is roughly an order of magnitude larger in strength than the ordered magnetic field. The only way to keep such a field energised …
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Dr. James Beattie and Dr. Anne Noer Kolborg (UCSC)
August 2024
There is sufficient energy in supernova detonations alone to drive the turbulence in our Galaxy. However, the nature of the supernova-driven cascade, the mechanism that transports energy from the …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Christoph Federrath (Australian National University)
August 2024
Many astrophysical observations are intrinsically two-dimensional in position-position space (PP; e.g., a column density map). However, astrophysical plasma models are usually constructed in …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton University)
August 2024
Strongly magnetised, compressible turbulence is ubiquitous in the solar wind, atmosphere of compact objects, and even cold molecular and atomic gas distributed across the Galaxy. Beattie, et al. …
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Dr. James Beattie
August 2024
The initial conditions for star formation are embedded in the fractal gas density structures produced by supersonic, magnetised turbulence. We understand in a lot of detail relations between the …
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Dr. James Beattie and Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton University)
August 2024
Magnetic helicity describes the topological knottedness of a magnetic field, and in ideal magnetohydrodynamics, it is an invariant. It plays an important role in large-scale dynamos, and the decay of …
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