The Oxford Atomic and Laser Physics webinar series welcomes Dr. James Sadler (LANL).
The Braginskii transport coefficients describe the flow of heat and magnetic field in a collisional magnetized plasma. Even if the magnetic pressure is far less than the plasma pressure, magnetic fields can deflect and insulate the heat flow, indirectly altering the hydrodynamics. The magnetic field is also enhanced and advected by the heat flow. We show that many magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulations have used a set of transport coefficients that yield an unphysical discontinuity in advection velocity. Here we use a kinetic Fokker-Planck approach to find new fit functions that rectify this issue and we describe a new MHD instability that results. It turns out that these re-definitions also bring out the symmetry of the transport coefficients and the thermal and magnetic transport that they describe.