English

A statistical model of three-dimensional anisotropy and intermittency in strong Alfv\'enic turbulence

Space Physics 2017-02-08 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We propose a simple statistical model of three-dimensionally anisotropic, intermittent, strong Alfv\'enic turbulence, incorporating both critical balance and dynamic alignment. Our model is based on log-Poisson statistics for Elsasser-field increments along the magnetic field. We predict the scalings of Elsasser-field conditional two-point structure functions with point separations in all three directions in a coordinate system locally aligned with the direction of the magnetic field and of the fluctuating fields and obtain good agreement with numerical simulations. We also derive a scaling of the parallel coherence scale of the fluctuations, lλ1/2l_\parallel \propto \lambda^{1/2}, where λ\lambda is the perpendicular scale. This is indeed observed for the bulk of the fluctuations in numerical simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.00466,
  title  = {A statistical model of three-dimensional anisotropy and intermittency in strong Alfv\'enic turbulence},
  author = {A. Mallet and A. A. Schekochihin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.00466},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures, accepted to MNRAS, replaced to match accepted version