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; HT 2026
Trinity Term and Summer 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 7 Apr |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Ildar Khabibullin --- Supercritical accretion onto black holes: a primer and a lab |
ADS
library |
Roger
Blandford (Stanford), Tunde Fulop (Chalmers) |
| Tue 14 Apr |
14:00 Lindemann LT |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Katherine Blundell (Oxford) & Roger Blandford (Stanford) --- SS433 Redux |
Roger
Blandford (Stanford) |
||
| 0 |
Tue 21 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) |
| 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 |
Roger
Blandford (Stanford), Steve Cowley (Princeton) |
|
| II |
Tue 5 May |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
1) Aikya Banerjee --- Resistivity of a plasma in the kinetic regime 2) James Edmiston & Lucas McConnell --- Quick report on Sherwood-2026 |
PRL
124, 255102 (2020) arXiv:2601.10472 +preprint from author in due course |
|
| III |
Tue 12 May |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Archei Bott will give a post-mortem of HEDLA-2026 |
||
| IV |
Tue 19 May |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by DMITRI)
Agi Wierzchucka and Pablo Bilbao will give a post-mortem of the 6th Purdue Workshop on Relativistic Plasma Astrophyscis |
Juan
Ruiz (York) |
|
| V |
Tue 26 May |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Aikya Banerjee --- Some new results in turbulence and chaos theory |
arXiv:2505.09538 arXiv:2605.19921 arXiv:2605.20160 |
|
| VI
|
Tue 2 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Daniele Fedeli (SNS) --- Solitary coherent structures in sheared plasma turbulence |
JPP 82,
905820609 (2016) JPP 86, 855860502 (2020) +draft dissertation available on request from author |
Daniele Fedeli (SNS), Francesco Pegoraro (U of Pisa) |
| VII |
Mon 8 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Enrico Martinez --- Structure, formation and evolution of electron phase-space holes in a hot-ion plasma |
PNAS 122,
e2417813122 (2025) +MMathPhys dissertation available on request from author |
Daniele Fedeli (SNS), Matt Kunz (Princeton), Jono Squire (Otago) |
| Tue 9 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Jono Squire (Otago) --- Coronal heating in arbitrary geometry |
Rep.
Prog. Phys. 76, 116201 (2013) +ask author for preprint |
||
| VIII |
Tue 16 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by MICHAEL)
Practice run for EPS presentations |
||
| 9 |
Tue 23 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Juan Ruiz Ruiz (York) --- An informal update on EPs and AEs in JET Felix Parra (Princeton) --- An informal update on 2D edge modes |
Harry
Fetsch, Felix Parra (Princeton), Juan Ruiz Ruiz (York) |
|
| Thu 25 June |
14:00 Fisher Room, DWB |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Harry Fetsch (Princeton) --- Fusion reactivity augmented by turbulence |
PRL
135, 155101 (2025) PoP 32, 112703 (2025) PoP 33, 020703 (2026) |
||
| |
29.06-3.07.26 |
EPS Plasma Physics
Conference, Edinburgh |
|||
| Tue 30 June |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Journal Club (organised by ARCHIE)
Archie Bott will discuss de Bonhome et al., "Formation of suprathermal electron populations in the expanding, turbulent solar wind" |
ApJ
1005, L9 (2026) |
|
|
| |
Mon 6 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Hideo Sugama (NIFS) --- Fluctuation theorem for collisionless processes in kinetic plasma systems |
PoP
32, 080701 (2025) arXiv:2606.17656 |
Toby Adkins (PPPL), Robbie Ewart (Stanford), Dion Li (MIT), Surui Li (Cambridge), Luis Silva (IST Lisbon), Hideo Sugama (NIFS), Muni Zhou (Dartmouth) |
| Tue 7 July |
14:00 Fisher Room, DWB |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Toby Adkins (PPPL) --- Imbalance in Alfvenic solar-wind turbulence: necessary for observational agreement? (tutorial-style talk on imbalance and the helicity barrier, featuring "hot off the press"---or not yet even in the press---results from MMS and Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter data) |
ApJ
990, 138 (2025) arXiv:2606.06340 (and refs therein) |
||
| Mon 13 July |
11:30 SL Room & ZOOM |
ALP Special Seminar (organised by S. Hooker
& P. Norreys) Gennady Shvets (Cornell) --- Science and applications of compact heavy-ion accelerators: from nuclear fusion to FLASH radiation therapy Research activities
on heavy-ion fusion (HIF) were abandoned over a decade
ago, and brought down to a crawl even earlier. It is
easy to forget that in the 90's HIF was considered to
be the top contender for developing inertial fusion
energy (IFE). This is not surprising: accelerator
technology is well-established, and the conversion
efficiency from a wall plug to accelerated particles
is hard to match, especially at the repetition rates
required for IFE power plants. Moreover, unlike most
laser fusion schemes, HIF does not require any
damageable optics. One of the often-cited reasons for
abandoning HIF is its non-modular nature: testing even
the most basic IFE components requires multi-km long
induction accelerators. Compact high-gradient
collective ion acceleration has the potential for
drastic reduction of the driver size---an important
step towards modularity and compactness. I will
describe the historical context for such schemes and
describe the latest efforts in my group to improve
them. In addition to driving future fusion power
plants, compact ion accelerators have many other
exciting applications that I will describe. Those
range from promising carbon ion radiation therapy in
the short-bunch (FLASH) regime to testing space-bound
electronics for deleterious effects from impinging
high-energy ions.
|
Robbie
Ewart (Stanford), Tunde Fulop (Chalmers), Surui Li (Cambridge), Stephen Majeski (UC Boulder), Gennady Shvets (Cornell), Luis Silva (IST Lisbon) |
||
| Tue 14 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
Pablo Bilbao (Oxford) --- Nonlinear X-mode propagation in magnetised pair plasmas |
ask author for preprint | ||
| Thu 16 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by DMITRI)
Stephen Majeski (UC Boulder) --- On the duality of pressure anisotropy in weakly collisional astro-plasmas |
JPP 90,
535900601 (2024) JPP 89, 905890417 (2023) +MNRAS 397, 52 (2009) |
||
| Tue 21 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by DMITRI)
Luis Silva (IST Lisbon) --- Extreme plasmas with intense beams: recent results and (speculative) future directions |
arXiv:2412.06783 JPP 92, E76 (2026) PRAB 28, 091001 (2025) |
Luis
Silva (IST Lisbon) |
|
| Tue 28 July |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ILDAR)
TBA/TBC |
Luis
Silva (IST Lisbon) |
||
| Tue 4 Aug |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by BARRY)
Leo Turica --- Marginal ETG turbulence and saturation by secondary instability We investigate the
nonlinear saturation of slab
electron-temperature-gradient (ETG) turbulence using a
collisional electrostatic drift-kinetic fluid model.
While the system saturates through a critically
balanced turbulent cascade far from marginality, we
find a qualitatively different state when close to the
stability threshold. Rather than forming a broadband
cascade, the turbulence condenses into a long-lived,
nearly monochromatic streamer corresponding to the
dominant linear ETG mode. On the basis that the
streamer drives an ETG instability of its own, we
argue that the streamer transfers free energy directly
to small scales, from where a turbulent cascade
ensues. This non-local free-energy transfer predicts
stiff transport close to marginal stability and may
provide a physical mechanism underlying the tendency
of H-mode tokamak pedestals to operate near slab-ETG
marginality.
|
JPP 89,
905890406 (2023) JPP 91, E58 (2025) JPP 91, E155 (2025) |
||
| Louis Richard (IRF Uppsala) moves to Oxford as a Marie Curie Fellow to work with Alex Schekochihin | |||||
| Tue 11 Aug |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Stuart Bale (UC Berkeley) --- TBA |
Stuart
Bale (UC Berkeley) |
||
| Tue 18 Aug |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA/TBC |
Pranab
Deka (KU Leuven) |
||
| Tue 25 Aug |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by MICHAEL)
TBA/TBC |
Pranab
Deka (KU Leuven) |
||
| |
Tue 1 Sept |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA/TBC |
|
Pranab
Deka (KU Leuven) |
| Tue 8 Sept |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by ALEX)
Kaibo Hu (Oxford Maths) --- TBA |
Ashley
Bransgrove (Princeton), Ben Chandran (UNH), Pranab Deka (KU Leuven) |
||
| Tue 15 Sept |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Seminar (organised by DMITRI)
Ashley Bransgrove (Princeton) --- TBA |
Ashley
Bransgrove (Princeton), Ben Chandran (UNH), Pranab Deka (KU Leuven) |
||
| Tue 22 Sept |
14:00 Room TBD |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ???)
TBA/TBC |
Ben
Chandran (UNH), Pranab Deka (KU Leuven) |
||
| Tue 29 Sept |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ALEX)
TBA/TBC |
Ben
Chandran (UNH) |
||
| 0 |
Tue 6 Oct |
14:00 SL Room & ZOOM (ask Alex for link) |
Plasma
Group Meeting (organised by ???)
TBA/TBC |
Ben
Chandran (UNH) |
|
| Daniele Fedeli
(SNS, Pisa) moves to Oxford for a DPhil with Michael
Barnes and Dan Kennedy Enrico Martinez (Oxford Physics) joins the group for a DPhil with Alex Schekochihin Juan Rajagopal (Imperial College) moves to Oxford for a DPhil with Dmitri Uzdensky and Plamen Ivanov |
|||||