Fluidization of collisionless plasma turbulence

DOI10.1073/PNAS.1813913116zbMATH Open1416.76353arXiv1808.04284OpenAlexW2885384086WikidataQ90892845 ScholiaQ90892845MaRDI QIDQ5222795FDOQ5222795

Authors: Romain Meyrand, A. Kanekar, Alexander A. Schekochihin, William Dorland 

Publication date: 3 July 2019

Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: In a collisionless, magnetized plasma, particles may stream freely along magnetic-field lines, leading to phase "mixing" of their distribution function and consequently to smoothing out of any "compressive" fluctuations (of density, pressure, etc.,). This rapid mixing underlies Landau damping of these fluctuations in a quiescent plasma-one of the most fundamental physical phenomena that make plasma different from a conventional fluid. Nevertheless, broad power-law spectra of compressive fluctuations are observed in turbulent astrophysical plasmas (most vividly, in the solar wind) under conditions conducive to strong Landau damping. Elsewhere in nature, such spectra are normally associated with fluid turbulence, where energy cannot be dissipated in the inertial scale range and is therefore cascaded from large scales to small. By direct numerical simulations and theoretical arguments, it is shown here that turbulence of compressive fluctuations in collisionless plasmas strongly resembles one in a collisional fluid and does have broad power-law spectra. This "fluidization" of collisionless plasmas occurs because phase mixing is strongly suppressed on average by "stochastic echoes", arising due to nonlinear advection of the particle distribution by turbulent motions. Besides resolving the long-standing puzzle of observed compressive fluctuations in the solar wind, our results suggest a conceptual shift for understanding kinetic plasma turbulence generally: rather than being a system where Landau damping plays the role of dissipation, a collisionless plasma is effectively dissipationless except at very small scales. The universality of "fluid" turbulence physics is thus reaffirmed even for a kinetic, collisionless system.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04284

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistical mechanics of plasmas (82D10) Ionized gas flow in electromagnetic fields; plasmic flow (76X05)

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