Astrophysical perspectives on relativistic turbulence

I will talk about relativistic turbulence. Turbulence is ubiquitious in astrophysical settings. In high-energy sources like relativistic jets, and also nearby compact objects, turbulent flows can become relativistic in nature. Either because the random fluid motions are close to the speed of light, or the gas is hot and the speed of sound is relativistic, or because plasma is strongly magnetized and the MHD wavespeeds get close to the speed of light. Computational efforts have focused on simulating kinematically relativistic turbulence to explore appropriate generalizations of the Kolomogorov energy specrum. Simulations have also explored MHD dynamos in relativistic settings but found no significant modifications to the non-relativistic case. Turbulence in force-free electrodynamics has now been explored in depth, and the results have been useful for interpreting the damping of magnetospheric oscillations following giant magnetar flares. Insights to the acceleration of non-thermal particles have come from the exploration of ab-initio particle-in-cell simulations of magnetically dominated turbulent plasma.