Gr.IV seminar: Oreste Pezzi - "Plasma turbulence in space: latest results and future perspectives"

Wednesday 29 Apr 2026, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

0M04

Space plasmas are excellent laboratories for investigating fundamental physical processes, such as turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and non-linear wave-particle interactions. Turbulence is the key phenomenon bridging the vast scale separation between large, injection scales and small, kinetic scales. Understanding kinetic-scale plasma turbulence is decisive for tackling the fundamental issues of energy dissipation, heating and particle acceleration, relevant for both space plasmas and far astrophysical systems. As a result of the weak collisionality, turbulence brings the plasma far from the local thermodynamical equilibrium, with particle velocity distribution functions that frequently show a variety of non-equilibrium velocity-space structures. Such an emerging complexity has been recently envisioned as a turbulent cascade occurring in the entire six-dimensional phase space. I will review some recent results on this topic and describe the on-going and future activities to further explore such a fascinating topic.