THE SLOW-MODE NATURE OF COMPRESSIBLE WAVE POWER IN SOLAR WIND TURBULENCE

By Gregory G. Howes, S. Bale, K. Klein, C. Chen, C. Salem, J. TenBarge. 2011

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a large, statistical set of measurements from the Wind spacecraft at 1 AU, and supporting synthetic spacecraft data based on kinetic plasma theory, to show that the compressible component of inertial range solar wind turbulence is primarily in the kinetic slow mode. The zero-lag cross-correlation C(δn, δB∥) between proton density fluctuations δn and the field-aligned (compressible) component of the magnetic field δB∥ is negative and close to −1. The typical dependence of C(δn, δB∥) on the ion plasma beta βi is consistent with a spectrum of compressible wave energy that is almost entirely in the kinetic slow mode. This has important implications for both the nature of the density fluctuation spectrum and for the cascade of kinetic turbulence to short wavelengths, favoring evolution to the kinetic Alfvén wave mode rather than the (fast) whistler mode.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/656c42047947e64ed0922e79a3dc0d64dfdce12c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Chen
2. S. Boldyrev
3. S. Bale
4. B. Chandran
5. John W. Bonnell
6. T. D. D. Wit
7. A. Mallet
8. Justin C. Kasper

In Computational Mechanics

1. C. Chen
2. A. Mallet
3. S. Bale

Citations in the corpus

• Nature of Kinetic Scale Turbulence in the Earth's Magnetosheath (2016, background): “…to order unity (e.g., Bale et al. 2005; Sahraoui et al. 2009; Howes & Quataert 2010; He et al. 2011; Podesta & Gary 2011; Yao et al. 2011a; Howes et al. 2012; Klein et al. 2012; TenBarge et al. 2012; Chen et al. 2013c,b; Kiyani et al. 2013; Bruno & Telloni 2015; Telloni et al. 2015;…”
• The Evolution and Role of Solar Wind Turbulence in the Inner Heliosphere (2019, methodology): “1 au measurements (Howes et al. 2012; Klein et al. 2012; Verscharen et al. 2017), as well as an analysis of PSP data (Chaston 2019), suggest that the compressive power is primarily in slow mode like fluctuations, so it is of interest to see if the radial variation in compressibility is due to…”
• Recent progress in astrophysical plasma turbulence from solar wind observations (2016, methodology): “Howes et al. (2012) compared solar wind measurements of this correlation to that produced from a critically balanced spectrum of kinetic slow waves plus an isotropic spectrum of kinetic fast waves, with different fractions of the two.”