Renormalization Group Analysis of Equilibrium and Non-equilibrium Charged Systems

This thesis has two parts, each based on an application of the renormalization-group (RG). The first part is an analysis of the d-dimensional Coulomb gas. The goal was to determine if the Wilson RG could provide input into particle-in-cell simulations in plasma physics, which are the main family of simulation methods used in this field. The role of the RG was to identify the effect of coarse-graining on the coupling constants as a function of the cut-offs. The RG calculation reproduced established results, but in a more concise form, and showed the effect of the cut-offs on the Debye screening length.

The main part of the thesis is the application of the dynamic RG to turbulence in magnetohydrodynamics. After transformation to Elsasser variables, which is a symmetrisation of the original equations, the solution is presented as a functional integral, which includes stirring forces, their conjugates and functional Jacobian. The coarse-graining of the functional integral is represented as a diagrammatic expansion, followed by rescaling, and casting the results into differential equations for the analysis of RG trajectories. Detailed comparisons are made with the Navier-Stokes limit and with previous calculations for MHD.