Anisotropy of Alfvénic turbulence in the solar wind and numerical simulations

By C. Chen, A. Mallet, Tarek Ahmed Yousef, A. Schekochihin, T. Horbury. 2010

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the anisotropy of Alfvenic turbulence in the inertial range of slow solar wind and in both driven and decaying reduced magnetohydrodynamic simulations. A direct com- parison is made by measuring the anisotropic second-order structure functions in both data sets. In the solar wind, the perpendicular spectral index of the magnetic field is close to −5/3. In the forced simulation, it is close to −5/3 for the velocity and −3/2 for the magnetic field. In the decaying simulation, it is −5/3 for both fields. The spectral index becomes steeper at small angles to the local magnetic field direction in all case s. We also show that when us- ing the global rather than local mean field, the anisotropic s caling of the simulations cannot always be properly measured.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0afa66e8d52e9b01b9f7df380a1f4560c17780bc

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Chen
2. O. Alexandrova
3. S. Bale
4. B. Chandran
5. John W. Bonnell
6. L. Sorriso-Valvo
7. T. D. D. Wit
8. A. Mallet

In Computational Mechanics

1. C. Chen
2. L. Sorriso-Valvo
3. A. Mallet
4. T. Horbury
5. O. Alexandrova
6. S. Bale

Citations in the corpus

• The Evolution and Role of Solar Wind Turbulence in the Inner Heliosphere (2019, background): “Firstly, the properties of the turbulent cascade may differ depending on whether it is forced at large scales or decaying; Chen et al. (2011) found that in a simulation of Alfvénic turbulence the spectral indices of all fields vary from −3/2 to −5/3 as the simulation transitions from a forced to a…”
• Solar Wind Turbulence and the Role of Ion Instabilities (2013, methodology): “…Scales, and Dissipation at Electron Scales As far as the turbulent cascade crosses the ion scales and before reaching the electron scales (the satellite frequencies being 3 ≤ f ≤ 30 Hz), magnetic spectra follow ∼ k−2.8⊥ (Alexandrova et al. 2009; Chen et al. 2010a; Sahraoui et al. 2010), see Fig.”
• Recent progress in astrophysical plasma turbulence from solar wind observations (2016, methodology): “The need to use such a mean field to test the critical balance predictions was identified in simulations (Cho & Vishniac 2000; Maron & Goldreich 2001) and a technique to do this in the solar wind, making use of the wavelet transform, was developed by Horbury et al. (2008).”