Journal article
Dissipation-Scale Turbulence in the Solar Wind
AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol.932(1), pp.3-8
08/28/2007
DOI: 10.1063/1.2778938
Abstract
We present a cascade model for turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas that follows the nonlinear cascade of energy from the large scales of driving in the MHD regime to the small scales of the kinetic Alfvén wave regime where the turbulence is dissipated by kinetic processes. Steady‐state solutions of the model for the slow solar wind yield three conclusions: (1) beyond the observed break in the magnetic energy spectrum, one expects an exponential cut‐off; (2) the widely held interpretation that this dissipation range obeys power‐law behavior is an artifact of instrumental sensitivity limitations; and, (3) over the range of parameters relevant to the solar wind, the observed variation of dissipation range spectral indices from −2 to −4 is naturally explained by the varying effectiveness of Landau damping, from an undamped prediction of −7/3 to a strongly damped index around −4.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Dissipation-Scale Turbulence in the Solar Wind
- Creators
- Gregory G Howes - University of California, BerkeleySteven C Cowley - Astrophysical SciencesWilliam Dorland - University of Maryland, College ParkGregory W Hammett - Princeton Plasma Physics LaboratoryEliot Quataert - University of California, BerkeleyAlexander A Schekochihin - Imperial College London
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol.932(1), pp.3-8
- DOI
- 10.1063/1.2778938
- ISSN
- 0094-243X
- eISSN
- 1551-7616
- Publisher
- AIP Publishing
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 08/28/2007
- Academic Unit
- Physics and Astronomy
- Record Identifier
- 9984428781902771
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