Journal article
Alfven Wave Collisions, The Fundamental Building Block of Plasma Turbulence IV: Laboratory Experiment
Physics of plasmas, Vol.20(7), p.72901
06/05/2013
DOI: 10.1063/1.4813242
Abstract
Turbulence is a phenomenon found throughout space and astrophysical plasmas.
It plays an important role in solar coronal heating, acceleration of the solar
wind, and heating of the interstellar medium. Turbulence in these regimes is
dominated by Alfven waves. Most turbulence theories have been established using
ideal plasma models, such as incompressible MHD. However, there has been no
experimental evidence to support the use of such models for weakly to
moderately collisional plasmas which are relevant to various space and
astrophysical plasma environments. We present the first experiment to measure
the nonlinear interaction between two counterpropagating Alfven waves, which is
the building block for astrophysical turbulence theories. We present here four
distinct tests that demonstrate conclusively that we have indeed measured the
daughter Alfven wave generated nonlinearly by a collision between
counterpropagating Alfven waves.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Alfven Wave Collisions, The Fundamental Building Block of Plasma Turbulence IV: Laboratory Experiment
- Creators
- D. J DrakeJ. W. R SchroederG. G HowesC. A KletzingF SkiffT. A CarterD. W Auerbach
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Physics of plasmas, Vol.20(7), p.72901
- DOI
- 10.1063/1.4813242
- ISSN
- 1070-664X
- eISSN
- 1089-7674
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/05/2013
- Academic Unit
- Physics and Astronomy
- Record Identifier
- 9984199728602771
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