Interplay between intermittency and dissipation in collisionless plasma turbulence. (June 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mallet, Alfred; Klein, Kristopher G.; Chandran, Benjamin D. G.; Grošelj, Daniel; Hoppock, Ian W.; Bowen, Trevor A.; Salem, Chadi S.; Bale, Stuart D.
• Is Part Of: Journal of plasma physics. Volume 85:Number 3(2019)
• Publication Date: 2019-06
• Subjects: astrophysical plasmas, -- plasma dynamics, -- space plasma physics; Plasma (Ionized gases) -- Periodicals; 530.4405
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022377819000357
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0022-3778

Abstract

Abstract : We study the damping of collisionless Alfvénic turbulence in a strongly magnetised plasma by two mechanisms: stochastic heating (whose efficiency depends on the local turbulence amplitude $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}z_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}$ ) and linear Landau damping (whose efficiency is independent of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}z_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}$ ), describing in detail how they affect and are affected by intermittency. The overall efficiency of linear Landau damping is not affected by intermittency in critically balanced turbulence, while stochastic heating is much more efficient in the presence of intermittent turbulence. Moreover, stochastic heating leads to a drop in the scale-dependent kurtosis over a narrow range of scales around the ion gyroscale.