An unsolved problem in plasma turbulence is how energy is dissipated at small scales. Particle collisions are too infrequent in hot plasmas to provide the necessary dissipation. Simulations either treat the fluid scales and impose an ad hoc form of dissipation (e.g., resistivity) or consider dissipation arising from resonant damping of small amplitude disturbances where damping rates are found to be comparable to that predicted from linear theory. Here, we report kinetic simulations that span the macroscopic fluid scales down to the motion of electrons. We find that turbulent cascade leads to generation of coherent structures in the form of current sheets that steepen to electron scales, triggering strong localized heating of the plasma. The dominant heating mechanism is due to parallel electric fields associated with the current sheets, leading to anisotropic electron and ion distributions which can be measured with NASA's upcoming Magnetospheric Multiscale mission. The motion of coherent structures also generates waves that are emitted into the ambient plasma in form of highly oblique compressional and shear Alfven modes. In 3D, modes propagating at other angles can also be generated. This indicates that intermittent plasma turbulence will in general consist of both coherent structures and waves. However, the current sheet heating is found to be locally several orders of magnitude more efficient than wave damping and is sufficient to explain the observed heating rates in the solar wind.

High resolution kinetic simulations of collisionless plasma driven by shear show the development of turbulence characterized by dynamic coherent sheetlike current density structures spanning a range of scales down to electron scales. We present evidence that these structures are sites for heating and dissipation, and that stronger current structures signify higher dissipation rates. Evidently, kinetic scale plasma, like magnetohydrodynamics, becomes intermittent due to current sheet formation, leading to the expectation that heating and dissipation in astrophysical and space plasmas may be highly nonuniform and patchy.

Low-density astrophysical plasmas may be described by magnetohydrodynamics at large scales, but require kinetic description at ion scales in order to include dissipative processes that terminate the cascade. Here kinetic plasma simulations and high-resolution spacecraft observations are compared to facilitate the interpretation of signatures of various dissipation mechanisms. Kurtosis of increments indicates that kinetic scale coherent structures are present, with some suggestion of incoherent activity near ion scales. Conditioned proton temperature distributions suggest heating associated with coherent structures. The results reinforce the association of intermittent turbulence, coherent structures, and plasma dissipation.

In this paper, we propose two new models in f (T ) gravity to realize the crossing of the phantom divide line for the effective equation of state, and we then study the observational constraints on the model parameters. The best fit results suggest that the observations favor a crossing of the phantom divide line.

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We propose a novel enhancement mechanism of the curvature perturbations in the nonminimal derivative coupling inflation model with a coupling parameter related to the inflaton field. By considering a special form of the coupling parameter as a function of the inflaton, a period of ultraslow-roll inflation can be realized due to the gravitationally enhanced friction, and the resulting power spectrum of the curvature perturbations has a sharp peak, which is large enough to produce the primordial black holes. Under this mechanism, we can easily obtain a sharp mass spectrum of primordial black holes around specific masses such as O(10)M , O(10 −5 )M , and O(10 −12 )M , which can explain the LIGO events, the ultrashort-timescale microlensing events in OGLE data, and the most of dark matter, respectively.

We perform a cosmological-model-independent test for the distance-duality (DD) relation η(z) = D L (z)(1 + z) −2 /D A (z), where D L and D A are the luminosity distance and angular diameter distance respectively, with a combination of observational data for D L taken from the latest Union2 SNe Ia and that for D A provided by two galaxy clusters samples compiled by De Filippis et al. and Bonamente et al.. Two parameterizations for η(z), i.e., η(z) = 1 + η 0 z and η(z) = 1 + η 0 z/(1 + z), are used. We find that the DD relation can be accommodated at 1σ confidence level (CL) for the De Filippis et al. sample and at 3σ CL for the Bonamente et al. sample. We also examine the DD relation by postulating two more general parameterizations: η(z) = η 0 + η 1 z and η(z) = η 0 + η 1 z/(1 + z), and find that the DD relation is compatible with the results from the De Filippis et al. and the Bonamente et al. samples at 1σ and 2σ CLs, respectively. Thus, we conclude that the DD relation is compatible with present observations.

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