Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 774, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/774/2/139
Keywords
plasmas; solar wind; turbulence
Categories
Funding
- NASA [NNX10AC91G]
- NSF CAREER [AGS-1054061]
- Office of Science of the U.S. DOE [DE-AC05-00OR22725]
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Div Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences [1054061] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- NASA [135963, NNX10AC91G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The dissipation of turbulence in the weakly collisional solar wind plasma is governed by unknown kinetic mechanisms. Two candidates have been suggested to play an important role in the dissipation, collisionless damping via wave-particle interactions and dissipation in small-scale current sheets. High resolution spacecraft measurements of the turbulent magnetic energy spectrum provide important constraints on the dissipation mechanism. The limitations of popular fluid and hybrid numerical schemes for simulation of the dissipation of solar wind turbulence are discussed, and instead a three-dimensional kinetic approach is recommended. We present a three-dimensional nonlinear gyrokinetic simulation of solar wind turbulence at electron scales that quantitatively reproduces the exponential form of the turbulent magnetic energy spectrum measured in the solar wind. A weakened cascade model that accounts for nonlocal interactions and collisionless Landau damping also quantitatively agrees with the observed exponential form. These results establish that a turbulent cascade of kinetic Alfven waves that is terminated by collisionless Landau damping is sufficient to explain the observed magnetic energy spectrum in the dissipation range of solar wind turbulence.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available