My first area of research was related to various aspects of astrophysical plasmas, mainly focusing on wave dispersion in strongly magnetized plasmas. This involved investigating circular polarization generated as radiation traverses a plasma in a mechanism analogous to a quarter-wave plate. It also involved considering processes involving neutrinos in magnetized plasmas, and wave dispersion in the vicinity of the cyclotron resonance in a strong magnetic field when the electron motion is effectively one dimensional (i.e. along magnetic field lines), due to being in the lowest Landau level.

"Cyclotron Effects on Wave Dispersion in Pulsar Plasmas",
M. P. Kennett, D. B. Melrose, and Q . Luo, J. Plas. Phys. 64, 333-352 (2000).

"Dispersion in an intrinsically relativistic, one-dimensional, strongly magnetized pair plasma",
D. B. Melrose, M. E. Gedalin, M. P. Kennett, and C. S. Fletcher, J. Plas. Phys. 62, 233-248 (1999).

"Neutrino emission via the plasma process in a magnetized plasma",
M. P. Kennett and D. B. Melrose, Phys. Rev. D 58, 093011 (1998). astro-ph/9901156

"Propagation-induced Circular Polarisation in Synchrotron Sources",
M. Kennett and D. Melrose, Publ. Astron. Soc. Aust. 15, 211-216 (1998).