English

Scale dependence of energy transfer in turbulent plasma

Space Physics 2019-12-25 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Plasma Physics

Abstract

In the context of space and astrophysical plasma turbulence and particle heating, several vocabularies emerge for estimating turbulent energy dissipation rate, including Kolmogorov-Yaglom third-order law and, in its various forms, jE\boldsymbol{j}\cdot\boldsymbol{E} (work done by the electromagnetic field on particles), and (P)u-\left( \boldsymbol{P} \cdot \nabla \right) \cdot \boldsymbol{u} (pressure-strain interaction), to name a couple. It is now understood that these energy transfer channels, to some extent, are correlated with coherent structures. In particular, we find that different energy dissipation proxies, although not point-wise correlated, are concentrated in proximity to each other, for which they decorrelate in a few did_i(s). However, the energy dissipation proxies dominate at different scales. For example, there is an inertial range over which the third-order law is meaningful. Contributions from scale bands stemming from scale-dependent spatial filtering show that, the energy exchange through jE\boldsymbol{j}\cdot\boldsymbol{E} mainly results from large scales, while the energy conversion from fluid flow to internal through (P)u-\left( \boldsymbol{P} \cdot \nabla \right) \cdot \boldsymbol{u} dominates at small scales.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.05677,
  title  = {Scale dependence of energy transfer in turbulent plasma},
  author = {Yan Yang and Minping Wan and William H. Matthaeus and Luca Sorriso-Valvo and Tulasi N. Parashar and Quanming Lu and Yipeng Shi and Shiyi Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.05677},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

20 pages, 7 figures