PLASMA
SEMINARS AND GROUP MEETINGS
The style of the seminars will be informal/chaotic/interactive, following the established tradition. The format of the presentations can be a tutorial on a topic of interest, a report on just completed/ongoing/just starting/potentially interesting research projects, a literature review, a lecture by a passing visitor or anything else worthwhile that anyone cares to suggest. The speakers will be interrupted freely and asked to defend themselves. For background reading , only the most relevant or the most recent references are posted; please follow the paper trail from there. The schedule is subject to change on short notice, but what you see posted here is always up to date; the seminars are also announced via the department's seminar server (group meetings are not). Please email Alex Schekochihin if you would like to receive email updates on these seminars. "Plasma group meetings (or journal clubs)" will discuss current affairs (ongoing projects, new litearture etc.) as well as feature some presentations that are even more informal than seminars. They are open to all members of the Oxford Plasma Theory Group . While some expected contributions are pre-announced, everything is TBC and people wishing their work to be discussed can volunteer contributions without prior notice. Unlike for the seminars, there will not be full-spam-list email reminders of the group meetings. The seminars and group meetings are organised by Michael Barnes, Alex Schekochihin, and Dmitri Uzdensky, please contact them with any queries or if you wish to present something.
Past
seminar database:
Autumn 2007;
Winter-Spring 2008;
Summer 2008;
Autumn 2008;
HT 2009;
TT 2009;
Summer 2009;
MT 2009;
HT 2009; TT
2010; Summer 2010; MT 2010; HT 2011; TT 2011; Summer 2011; MT 2011; HT 2012; TT 2012; Summer 2012; MT 2012; HT 2013; TT & Summer 2013;
MT 2013; HT 2014; TT & Summer 2014;
MT 2014; HT 2015; TT & Summer 2015;
MT 2015; HT 2016; TT & Summer 2016;
Autumn/MT 2016; HT 2017; TT & Summer 2017;
Autumn/MT 2017; HT 2018; TT & Summer 2018;
MT 2018; HT 2019; TT & Summer 2019;
MT 2019; HT 2020; TT & Summer 2020;
MT 2020; HT 2021; TT & Summer
2021; Autumn/MT 2021;
HT 2021;
TT & Summer
2022; Autumn/MT
2022; HT 2023; TT & Summer
2023; Autumn/MT 2023;
HT 2024;
TT & Summer
2024; Autumn/MT 2024;
HT 2025;
TT & Summer
2025; Autumn/MT 2025
Hilary Term of 2026
The seminars/group meetings will
be on Tuesday at 14:00 in the Simpkins Lee
Room, Beecroft Building , except where indicated otherwise
below, in red .
It will be possible to join these
meetings (when they are held in SL Room) on ZOOM
--- details available from Alex on request.
Those who join
these meetings on ZOOM are asked keep their video
cameras on.
The ZOOM
system in Simpkins Lee Room does not display a list of
participants whose cameras are off. It is not germane to
these informal meetings to have invisible listeners of whom
those present in the room are unaware, so if you are
unable or unwilling to turn on your camera, you cannot
join the meeting.
Here is a list
of all Physics seminars.
|
If you know exactly what you are going to do, what
is the point of doing it?
Pablo Picasso I don't give a damn about astrophysics, explain to me what is going on. Anatoly Spitkovsky
Have you subtracted the baby with the bathwater?
Steve
Balbus I wouldn't say these are theoretical arguments... Let's just call them arguments. Francois Rincon This qualitative explanation is not of sufficient quality. Eugene Churazov If you mean it seriously, this is actually a very good question. Minhyong Kim This paper is a tour
de farce. Ian Abel |
It is
better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.
Carveth Read
(usually attributed to Maynard Keynes)
Now
that everyone knows this is the new Pandora's
box, they are all going to jump into it.
Francois Rincon This is not
real, it's a Platonic absolute.---The real thing is
more Platonic and more absolute. Alex Schekochihin &
Anthony Field
|
[these quotes are mostly from these seminars and the
Vienna meetings]
| Wk |
Date |
Time & place |
Speaker &
Topic |
Background reading |
Visitors in town |
| |
Tue 6 Jan |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ARCHIE)
Informal discussion: "NY resolutions/revolutions in plasma theory, 2026 edition". Contributions welcome! |
|
|
| 0 |
Tue 13 Jan |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by DMITRI)
Benoit Cerutti (Grenoble) --- Electrodynamics of pulsar magnetospheres: current sheets and particle acceleration |
ARA&A
60, 495 (2022) A&A 695, A93 (2025) |
Benoit
Cerutti (Grenoble) |
| I |
Tue 20 Jan |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by MICHAEL FITZGERALD)
Rose Blyth (Durham) --- Reduced model describing resonance overlap threshold for fast ion transport by toroidal Alfven eigenmodes |
NF
doi 10.1088/1741-4326/ae2938, in press |
Rose
Blyth (Durham) |
| II |
Tue 27 Jan |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Journal Club (organised by ALEX)
James Edmiston will discuss recently published results on suppression of turbulence by fast ions (Brioschi et al., Ishizawa et al., Du et al. --- links on the right) |
arXiv:2512.18639 Comm. Phys. 8, 486 (2025) PRL 135, 265101 (2025) |
|
| III |
Tue 3 Feb |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Howard Wilson (STEP) --- Delivering a steady-state tokamak plasma for fusion energy |
|
David
Hosking (Cambridge) Howard Wilson (STEP) |
| IV |
Tue 10 Feb |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Param Luhadiya (Iliad) --- Interpreting deep neural networks |
|
Param
Luhadiya (Iliad) |
| V |
Tue 17 Feb |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting/Journal Club (organised by ALEX)
1) Agi Wierzchucka will discuss double-adiabatic closures: her own latest work and new papers by Tevzadze and by Ensslin & Pfrommer 2) Pablo will review Boldyrev & Medvedev's paper on turbulence in nonneutral ultrarelativistic pair plasmas |
1) arXiv:2602.01314 arXiv:2602.11053 +preprint on request from Agi 2) ApJ 998, 137 (2026) |
|
| VI |
Tue 24 Feb |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Journal Club (organised by ALEX)
Aikya Banerjee will review some recent progress on shear dynamo: papers by Tripathi et al. and by Rincon |
Nature
649, 848 (2026) arXiv:2512.09536 |
|
| VII |
Tue 3 Mar |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by PABLO)
Diogo Carvalho (IST Lisbon & DeepMind, London) --- Studying collisional dynamics in plasmas with self-consistent kinetic simulations |
arXiv:2601.13377 arXiv:2601.10885 Mach. Learn. Sci. Tech. 5, 025048 (2024) PoP 1, 4043 (1994) |
Georgia
Acton (IPP Greifswald), Diogo Carvalho (IST Lisbon & DeepMind, London) |
|
VIII |
Tue 10 Mar |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by BARRY)
Anna Lisa Varri (Edinburgh) --- Quasi-isothermal spheres with central black holes I will introduce a
family of self-consistent equilibria for spherically
symmetric, isotropic stellar systems with a central
black hole. The family is defined by a truncated
isothermal distribution function in phase space,
suitably modified to allow for the presence of a
central point mass. I will present self-consistent
solutions of the nonlinear Poisson equation for the
mean-field potential, which I will then characterise
using matched asymptotic expansions over three nested
regimes of the relevant parameter space. This approach
reveals a sharp transition between equilibria
dominated by the mass of the host stellar system or by
the mass of the central black hole. A thermodynamic
characterisation using caloric curves shows that the
black-hole-dominated equilibria populate a new branch,
connected, via a first-order microcanonical phase
transition, to the classic truncated isothermal
spheres. This class of models has also been extended
to the case of a rigidly rotating, axisymmetric
equilibria, and I will highlight the main implications
of introducing angular momentum into this problem.
|
A&A
540, A94 (2012) ApJ 199, 328 (1975) A&A 412, 1 (2003) |
Georgia
Acton (IPP Greifswald), Anna Lisa Varri (Edinburgh) |
| Ildar Khabibullin (LMU-Munich) moves to Oxford as a Simons PDRA to work with Alex Schekochihin and Dmitri Uzdensky | |||||
| 9 |
Tue 17 Mar |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by GIANLUCA)
Jon Skidmore (First Light Fusion) will describe FLARE --- FLF's new approach to inertial fusion energy This presentation
introduces FLARE (Fusion via Low-power Assembly and
Rapid Excitation), a new concept developed by First
Light Fusion to address longstanding challenges in
inertial fusion. FLARE approaches inertial fusion
through three key principles: (1) a novel target
architecture that reduces driver power requirements
whilst enabling higher energy gain; (2) low-power
pulsed compression, which offers a simpler,
lower-cost, and more efficient alternative to
conventional high-power lasers; and (3) a liquid
lithium pool reactor, designed to absorb neutrons,
breed tritium, and shield structural components,
thereby extending operational lifetime and improving
both economic viability and engineering feasibility.
Together, these principles underpin an integrated,
robust, and scalable system that offers a credible and
economically viable pathway to inertial fusion energy.
|
|
Georgia
Acton (IPP Greifswald) Jon Skidmore (FLF) |
| |
Tue 24 Mar |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX & TUNDE)
Michael Roop (Chalmers) --- Structure-preserving modelling of MHD turbulence via matrix hydrodynamics |
IMA
J. Num. Analysis, draf024 JPP 92, E30 (2026) |
Roger
Blandford (Stanford), Simran Chowdhry (MIT), Robbie Ewart (Princeton), Michael Roop (Chalmers) |
| |
Tue 31 Mar |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by RICHARD)
Rohan Ramasamy (Proxima Fusion) --- On the physics basis for a high-field Q>1 stellarator |
|
Roger
Blandford (Stanford) |
| Daniele Fedeli
moves back to Pisa (but will return in the autumn as a
DPhil student) |
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