Kinetic Signatures and Intermittent Turbulence in the Solar Wind Plasma

Details Kinetic Signatures and Intermittent Turbulence in the Solar Wind Plasma Kinetic Signatures and Intermittent Turbulence in the Solar Wind Plasma

2012-03-29

arxiv.org/abs/1203.6596v2

Physics

Space Physics

4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters

Scientific paper

A connection between kinetic processes and intermittent turbulence is observed in the solar wind plasma using measurements from the Wind spacecraft at 1 AU. In particular, kinetic effects such as temperature anisotropy and plasma heating are concentrated near coherent structures, such as current sheets, which are non-uniformly distributed in space. Furthermore, these coherent structures are preferentially found in plasma unstable to the mirror and firehose instabilities. The inhomogeneous heating in these regions, which is present in both the magnetic field parallel and perpendicular temperature components, results in protons at least 3-4 times hotter than under typical stable plasma conditions. These results offer a new understanding of kinetic processes in a turbulent regime, where linear Vlasov theory is not sufficient to explain the inhomogeneous plasma dynamics operating near non-Gaussian structures.

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