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) |
|
| Ildar
Khabibullin (LMU-Munich) moves to Oxford
as a Simons PDRA to work with Alex Schekochihin and
Dmitri Uzdensky |
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| 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) --- TBA |
|
Georgia
Acton (IPP Greifswald), Anna Lisa Varri (Edinburgh) |
| 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 |
|
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) --- TBA/TBC |
|
Roger
Blandford (Stanford), 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) |
| |
Tue 7 Apr |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA |
|
Roger
Blandford (Stanford) |
| |
Tue 14 Apr |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Caroline Terquem (Oxford) --- Turbulent damping of fast oscillations by a convective flow Traditional
mixing-length models describe tidal dissipation in
convective flows as a large-scale oscillation damped
by an effective turbulent viscosity that is
artificially reduced when the oscillation period is
much shorter than the convective turnover time. This
yields dissipation rates far below observational
constraints. From first principles, we have shown that
this picture should be reversed for high-frequency
oscillations: the fluctuations correspond to the tidal
oscillation and the mean shear arises from large
convective eddies. This framework yields an energy
exchange rate coupling the oscillation's Reynolds
stress with the convective shear but it does not, on
its own, specify whether energy flows into or out of
the oscillation. Three-dimensional Rayleigh-Benard
simulations with a radiative free surface show that
the oscillations in fact transfer energy to the mean
convective flow, at the rate ~ u'^2/t_conv,
demonstrating strong correlations between fluctuation
velocities and the large-scale shear. These arise
because the oscillatory forcing displaces fluid
elements, which are then redirected by buoyancy and
incompressibility in the same manner as the mean flow.
Within the simple equilibrium-tide framework, this
damping mechanism reconciles theory with observed
dissipation.
|
MNRAS
503, 5789 (2021) MNRAS 507, 4165 (2021) MNRAS 525, 508 (2023) +preprint from author on request |
Roger
Blandford (Stanford) |
| 0 |
Tue 21 Apr |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA |
|
Roger
Blandford (Stanford) |
| I |
Tue 28 Apr |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Richard Nies will give a post-mortem of ISHW-2026 |
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| VI
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Tue 2 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA |
|
|
|
Louis Richard (IRF Uppsala)
moves to Oxford as a Vetenskspsradets
international postdoc to work with Alex Schekochihin
|
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| VIII |
Tue 9 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Jono Squire (Otago) --- TBA/TBC |
Jono
Squire (Otago) |
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... |
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Mon 6 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
1) Hideo Sugama (NIFS) --- Fluctuation theorem for collisionless processes in kinetic plasma systems 2) Toby Adkins (PPPL) --- TBA |
1) PoP 32, 080701
(2025) |
Toby Adkins (PPPL), Luis Silva (IST Lisbon), Hideo Sugama (NIFS) |
| Tue 14 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA/TBC |
Luis
Silva (IST Lisbon) |
||
| Tue 21 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ???)
TBA/TBC |
Luis
Silva (IST Lisbon) |
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| Tue 28 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ???)
TBA/TBC |
Luis
Silva (IST Lisbon) |
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... |
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| Tue 22 Sept |
14:00 Room TBD |
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