Dhrubaditya Mitra

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Astrophysical Magnetohydrodynamics in 24 hours

This course will consist of total 24 lectures each of one hour duration, but fortunately not delivered without a break. The course will be spread over 10 weeks in the spring semester of 2016. See the schedule at the bottom of this page for further details.

Course Materials

It is difficult to find one book which is appropriate for this course. Some of the material I intend to cover is scattered over several books, some can be found in review articles. I list some of the sources below:

Syllabus:

I assume that you have had a short course on fluid dynamics, typically the gas dynamics course given in the fall semester by Stephan Rosswog. But this is not mandatory. What is mandatory, however, is to have a good knowledge of classical mechanics, electrodynamics and statistical mechanics as is expected in any advanced graduate student. Although the course is called "astrophysical" masters and PhD students in physics are welcome.

This is the second time I am teaching this course. Taking into account the feedback from the students last time, I have made some changes in the topics to be covered and the style. The lectures notes from last time (2016) are available here. They would still be quite useful this time too. But this time I am going to stay closer to the book: Physics of Fluids and Plasmas, PFP for short, mentioned before. The preliminary organizational structure is as follows.

    Parker's paper on solar wind : In class we discussed Parker's paper twice, once when we discussed the static solutions of the solar corona and second when we discussed the solar wind problem. I strongly suggest that you read Parker's original paper which is one of the masterpieces of astrophysics. It can be downloaded here.

    Notes of functionals : The notes used in class to teach functionals is here.

    Homework Set II : Must be returned on 15th of February, can be found here.

  1. Background Reading Chapter 1 of PFP up to section 1.3

Schedule
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Last modified: Fri Oct 30 19:02:09 EET 2015