Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Visible matter in the universe is mostly in the state of plasma. The ubiquity of plasma makes me wonder if we can obtain a universal law of physics that is applicable to the majority of the universe.

The fascinating property of plasma is its wide-range applicability. In the space near the earth, plasma exists in objects such as the sun, the solar wind, and the planetary magnetospheres. In the far distant space, accretion disk around compact stars, interstellar medium, and intracluster medium are known to be composed of plasma. Plasma can also be found in our daily life (e.g., thunder). The spatial scale of these phenomena ranges from the order of meters to million light years. Many other physical quantities of plasma including temperature and density are also wide-ranging.

Plasma physics is a discipline that is applicable to all the scales listed above. The equations describing plasma motion are "useful" tools for understanding a variety of phenomena in the universe. We could also say that plasma physics is interdisciplinary in nature as it has many applications.

I have studied fundamental aspects of plasma using theoretical, numerical, and experimental approaches. Recently, I have been studying accretion disk plasma using gyrokinetics, a method which has been used in fusion research for decades. My next plan is to apply what I have learned for various other phenomena, for which I am exploring opportunities to collaborate with people in FRIS who have various research backgrounds.