Speaker
Description
Astrophysical jets from supermassive black holes form large-scale radio sources extending hundreds of kiloparsecs, while micro-quasar jets powered by stellar-mass black holes remain confined to sub-parsec scales within the interstellar medium. Despite this disparity, both systems share key magneto-hydrodynamical properties: they are fast, low-density outflows propagating through a denser ambient medium and exhibit similar launching mechanisms, collimation behaviour and fluid/magnetic instabilities. These analogies motivate a unified approach to jet physics across mass and spatial scales, yet the connection between large- and small-scale jets—and the origin of their intense radiation—remains insufficiently explored.
My work aims to investigate jet dynamics and their role in particle acceleration through high-resolution relativistic MHD simulations with the PLUTO code. I will demonstrate the development of large-scale instabilities, including Kelvin–Helmholtz, pressure driven and kink modes. Since particle energization depends critically on magnetic-field topology, magnetization and plasma density, selected MHD configurations will be used as inputs for PIC simulations to model the resulting radiation emission and to probe the underlying kinetic processes.
