Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsh42b..04h&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SH42B-04
Physics
Plasma Physics
[7863] Space Plasma Physics / Turbulence
Scientific paper
Presently, there is an intense debate on which oblique wave mode is, besides the parallel Alfven-cyclotron wave, responsible for further energy cascading or damping in the dissipation range of solar wind turbulence. From numerical simulation and dimensional analysis, the power spectra in the dissipation range with a power law like k^(-7/3) can be reproduced based on either the kinetic Alfven wave or whistler wave. Here, we aim to show which one may be dominant in reality on the basis of solar wind measurements by STEREO satellite. We extract small-scale magnetic fluctuations in the dissipation range from the time series by employing the wavelet decomposition method. We then study two parameters (magnetic compressibility and magnetic polarization) of the small-scale magnetic fluctuations in such time intervals where the direction of the local mean magnetic field is nearly orthogonal to the direction of the solar wind velocity. We find that the magnetic compressibility in the dissipation range is less than 0.25, which is much smaller than the magnetic compressibility (~1.0) of quasi-perpendicular whistler waves, but closer to the value of kinetic Alfven waves. Moreover, we find that the small-scale magnetic fluctuations seems to be elliptically polarized in the plane normal to the solar wind velocity direction, and the major axis of the polarization ellipse is perpendicular to local mean magnetic field direction. This kind of observed magnetic polarization is consistent with the characteristics of kinetic Alfven waves. Therefore, we may conclude that, in the fast solar wind streams we have looked at, oblique kinetic Alfven waves do exist and may play a role in the dissipation range and for turbulence cascading and damping.
He Jingsong
Marsch Eckart
Tian Hanqin
Tu Chang-Cun
Wang Xinhua
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