Abstract

Invited Talk - Splinter NonThermalAccel   (MW-1250)

Resistive MHD Modelling of Astrophysical Jets

G. Mattia
MPIA - Heidelberg

Relativistic jets from active galactic nuclei are among the most powerful and extended plasma structures in the Universe, yet the physical processes that shape their emission - magnetic dissipation, reconnection, and particle acceleration - remain poorly captured by standard ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). In the ideal limit, magnetic reconnection proceeds only through uncontrolled numerical resistivity, severing the link between dissipation physics and the observable signatures that instruments such as the EHT, VLBI arrays, and the forthcoming ngVLA and SKA are increasingly able to resolve. Resistive relativistic MHD offers a physically grounded alternative, introducing an explicit, controllable resistivity that allows current sheets to form and dissipate energy consistently. In this talk, I will review recent progress in resistive relativistic MHD modeling of astrophysical jets, from the numerical methods that make these simulations tractable - high-order schemes and IMEX time integration within the GPU-accelerated PLUTO code - to their application to jet propagation, current-sheet formation, and reconnection-driven dissipation. I will also highlight how effective-resistivity prescriptions, calibrated against kinetic simulations, now reproduce collisionless reconnection rates within a fluid framework, and discuss the emerging frontier of connecting this plasma microphysics to synthetic observables.