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Characterizing the Velocity-Space Signature of Electron Landau Damping
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Characterizing the Velocity-Space Signature of Electron Landau Damping

Sarah A Conley, Gregory G Howes and Andrew J McCubbin
ArXiv.org
Cornell University
10/02/2023
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.01242
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.01242View
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Plasma turbulence plays a critical role in the transport of energy from large-scale magnetic fields and plasma flows to small scales, where the dissipated turbulent energy ultimately leads to heating of the plasma species. A major goal of the broader heliophysics community is to identify the physical mechanisms responsible for the dissipation of the turbulence and to quantify the consequent rate of plasma heating. One of the mechanisms proposed to damp turbulent fluctuations in weakly collisional space and astrophysical plasmas is electron Landau damping. The velocity-space signature of electron energization by Landau damping can be identified using the recently developed field-particle correlation technique. Here, we perform a suite of gyrokinetic turbulence simulations with ion plasma beta values of 0.01, 0.1, 1, and 10 and use the field-particle correlation technique to characterize the features of the velocity-space signatures of electron Landau damping in turbulent plasma conditions consistent with those observed in the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres. We identify the key features of the velocity-space signatures of electron Landau damping as a function of varying plasma \beta_i to provide a critical framework for interpreting the results of field-particle correlation analysis of in situ spacecraft observations of plasma turbulence.
Physics - Plasma Physics

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