Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A plasma is a completed ionized gas. In many applications such as in nuclear fusion or astrophysical phenomena, the plasma has very high temperature and low density, thus collisions can be ignored. The standard kinetic models for a collisionless plasma are the Vlasov- Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson systems. The Vlasov-Poisson system is also used to model galaxy dynamics, where a star plays the role of a particle. There exists infinitely many equilibria for Vlasov models and their stability is a very important issue in physics. I will describe some of my works on stability and instability of various Vlasov equilibria.