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Scale Statistics of Current Sheets in Relativistic Collisionless Plasma Turbulence

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-04-02 v1 Plasma Physics

Abstract

We analyze distributions of the spatial scales of coherent intermittent structures -- current sheets -- obtained from fully kinetic, two-dimensional simulations of relativistic plasma turbulence using unsupervised machine-learning data dissection. We find that the distribution functions of sheet length \ell (longest scale of the analyzed structure in the direction perpendicular to the dominant guide field) and curvature rcr_c (radius of a circle fitted to the structures) can be well-approximated by power-law distributions, indicating self-similarity of the structures. The distribution for the sheet width ww (shortest scale of the structure) peaks at the kinetic scales and decays exponentially at larger values. The data shows little or no correlation between ww and \ell, as expected from theoretical considerations. The typical rcr_c depends linearly on \ell, which indicates that the sheets all have a similar curvature relative to their sizes. We find a weak correlation between rcr_c and ww. Our results can be used to inform realistic magnetohydrodynamic sub-grid models for plasma turbulence in high-energy astrophysics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.12511,
  title  = {Scale Statistics of Current Sheets in Relativistic Collisionless Plasma Turbulence},
  author = {Roberto F. Serrano and Joonas Nättilä and Vladimir Zhdankin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.12511},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages, 10 figures