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This white paper, submitted for the Plasma 2020 Decadal Survey, concerns the physics of weakly collisional, high-beta plasmas -- plasmas in which the thermal pressure dominates over the magnetic pressure and in which the inter-particle collision time is comparable to the characteristic timescales of bulk motions. This state of matter, although widespread in the Universe, remains poorly understood: we lack a predictive theory for how it responds to perturbations, how it transports momentum and energy, and how it generates and amplifies magnetic fields. Such topics are foundational to the scientific study of plasmas, and are of intrinsic interest to those who regard plasma physics as a fundamental physics discipline. But these topics are also of extrinsic interest: addressing them directly informs upon our understanding of a wide variety of space and astrophysical systems, including accretion flows around supermassive black holes, the intracluster medium (ICM) between galaxies in clusters, and regions of the near-Earth solar wind. Specific recommendations to advance this field of study are discussed.
The physical foundations of the dissipation of energy and the associated heating in weakly collisional plasmas are poorly understood. Here, we compare and contrast several measures that have been used to characterize energy dissipation and kinetic-sc
A multi-institutional, multi-national science team will soon submit a NASA proposal to build a constellation of spacecraft to fly into the near-Earth solar wind in a swarm spanning a multitude of scales in order to obtain critically needed measuremen
We developed an experimental platform for studying magnetic reconnection in an external magnetic field with simultaneous measurements of plasma imaging, flow velocity, and magnetic-field variation. Here, we investigate the stagnation and acceleration
Intense electric currents called electrojets occur in weakly ionized magnetized plasmas. An example occurs in the Earths ionosphere near the magnetic equator where neutral winds drive the plasma across the geomagnetic field. Similar processes take pl
We perform fully kinetic simulations of flows known to produce dynamo in magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), considering scenarios with low Reynolds number and high magnetic Prandtl number, relevant for galaxy cluster scale fluctuation dynamos. We find that