Related papers: Collisionless Isotropization of the Solar-Wind Pro…
Kinetic plasma theory is used to generate synthetic spacecraft data to analyze and interpret the compressible fluctuations in the inertial range of solar wind turbulence. The kinetic counterparts of the three familiar linear MHD wave…
Intermittency in fluid turbulence can be emphasized through the analysis of Probability Distribution Functions (PDF) for velocity fluctuations, which display a strong non-gaussian behavior at small scales. Castaing et al. (1990) have…
Although the interplanetary magnetic field variability has been extensively investigated in situ by means of data coming from several space missions, the newly launched missions providing high-resolution measures and approaching the Sun,…
Plasma turbulence cascading from MHD to kinetic scales in the heliospheric plasma is believed to play a key role in coronal heating and fast solar wind acceleration, but the properties of the turbulence remain poorly constrained by…
We investigate the spectral shape, the anisotropy of the wave vector distributions and the anisotropy of the amplitudes of the magnetic fluctuations in the Earth's magnetosheath within a broad range of frequencies. We present the first…
Turbulent behavior at sub-proton scales in magnetized plasmas is important for a full understanding of the energetics of astrophysical flows such as the solar wind. We study the formation of electron temperature anisotropy due to…
Using a hybrid kinetic magnetohydrodynamic formalism incorporating the effects of pressure anisotropy, we simulate the evolution of a turbulent collisionless plasma in six different models covering the sub/super-sonic and…
Measurements made with the Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that significant levels of compressive fluctuations exist in the inner heliosheath. Some studies have already been performed with respect to the mirror-mode instability in the…
Turbulence, a ubiquitous phenomenon in interplanetary space, is crucial for the energy conversion of space plasma at multiple scales. This work focuses on the propagation, polarization and wave composition properties of the solar wind…
We perform fully-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of an hot plasma that expands radially in a cylindrical geometry. The aim of the paper is to study the consequent development of the electron temperature anisotropy in an expanding…
This paper explores the thermodynamics of fluctuating polytropic processes and their connection to turbulence. It is shown that random fluctuations of polytropic processes produce a nonzero overall heating of a particle system, e.g., solar…
The Bandt-Pompe permutation entropy and the Jensen-Shannon statistical complexity are used to analyze fluctuating time series of three different plasmas: the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in the plasma wind tunnel of the Swarthmore…
We use in-situ data from the Wind spacecraft to survey the amplitude of turbulent fluctuations in the proton density and total magnetic field inside a large sample of near-Earth magnetic clouds (MCs) associated with coronal mass ejections…
Solar wind provides an example of a weakly collisional plasma expanding from a thermal source in the presence of spatially diverging magnetic field lines. Observations show that in the inner heliosphere, the electron temperature declines…
The collisionless dissipation of anisotropic Alfv\'enic turbulence is a promising candidate to solve the solar wind heating problem. Extensive studies examined the kinetic properties of Alfv\'en waves in simple Maxwellian or bi-Maxwellian…
Motivated by recent observations of distinct parallel and perpendicular signatures in magnetic helicity measurements segregated by wave period and angle between the local magnetic field and the solar wind velocity, this paper undertakes a…
Minor ions in the solar corona are heated to extreme temperatures, far in excess of those of the electrons and protons that comprise the bulk of the plasma. These highly non-thermal distributions make minor ions sensitive probes of the…
In situ measurements of kinetic scale current sheets in the solar wind show that they are often approximately force-free although the plasma beta is of order one. They frequently display systematic asymmetric and anti-correlated spatial…
Circularly polarized, nearly parallel propagating waves are prevalent in the solar wind at ion-kinetic scales. At these scales, the spectrum of turbulent fluctuations in the solar wind steepens, often called the transition-range, before…
Understanding the nature of the turbulent fluctuations below the ion gyroradius in solar-wind turbulence is a great challenge. Recent studies have been mostly in favor of kinetic Alfv\'en wave (KAW) type of fluctuations, but other kinds of…