Three Dimensional Anisotropic k Spectra of Turbulence at Subproton Scales in the Solar Wind

By Fouad Sahraoui, M. Goldstein, G. Belmont, Patrick Canu, L. Rezeau. 2010

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show the first three dimensional (3D) dispersion relations and k spectra of magnetic turbulence in the solar wind at subproton scales. We used the Cluster data with short separations and applied the k-filtering technique to the frequency range where the transition to subproton scales occurs. We show that the cascade is carried by highly oblique kinetic Alfven waves with {omega}{sub plas{<=}}0.1{omega}{sub ci} down to k{sub perpendicular{rho}i{approx}}2. Each k spectrum in the direction perpendicular to B{sub 0} shows two scaling ranges separated by a breakpoint (in the interval [0.4,1]k{sub perpendicular{rho}i}): a Kolmogorov scaling k{sub perpendicular}{sup -1.7} followed by a steeper scaling {approx}k{sub perpendicular}{sup -4.5}. We conjecture that the turbulence undergoes a transition range, where part of the energy is dissipated into proton heating via Landau damping and the remaining energy cascades down to electron scales where electron Landau damping may predominate.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/000197555013875fd462dc891cbb3b8633e8e030

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Chen
2. O. Alexandrova
3. S. Bale
4. L. Sorriso-Valvo
5. Meng Zhou
6. X. Deng
7. T. Horbury
8. M. Maksimović

In Oceanography

1. C. Chen
2. T. Horbury

Citations in the corpus

• SOLAR WIND TURBULENT SPECTRUM AT PLASMA KINETIC SCALES (2012, methodology): “2007, 2008), or, following the nomenclature of Smith et al. (2012), an electron inertial range. Here, indeed, a reproducible spectrum ∝ k−2.8 ⊥ is observed (Alexandrova et al. 2009; Chen et al. 2010; Sahraoui et al. 2010). Approaching electron scales, one may expect to observe an electron dissipatio”
• Solar Wind Turbulence and the Role of Ion Instabilities (2013, background): “i and kλ i (named here a transition range) one observes a divergence of the spectra. The origin of this divergence is not completely clear. It is possible that ion damping, e.g. (Denskat et al. 1983; Sahraoui et al. 2010), a competition between the convective and Hall terms (Kiyani et al. 2013) or i”
• Kinetic structure and wave properties associated with sharp dipolarization front observed by Cluster (2012, methodology): “…wave vector domain from data measured simultaneously in several different points in space, under the assumption of (sufficient) stationarity of the time series (more details on this technique can be found in Pinçon and Lefeuvre, 1991; Pinçon and Motschmann, 1998; Sahraoui et al., 2003, 2010a).”