SCALING OF THE ELECTRON DISSIPATION RANGE OF SOLAR WIND TURBULENCE

By Fouad Sahraoui, S. Huang, G. Belmont, M. Goldstein, A. Retinò, P. Robert, J. de Patoul. 2013

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electron scale solar wind (SW) turbulence has attracted great interest in recent years. Considerable evidence exists that the turbulence is not fully dissipated near the proton scale, but continues cascading down to electron scales. However, the scaling of the magnetic energy spectra as well as the nature of the plasma modes involved at those small scales are still not fully determined. Here we survey 10 yr of the Cluster STAFF search-coil magnetometer waveforms measured in the SW and perform a statistical study of the magnetic energy spectra in the frequency range [1, 180] Hz. We found that 75% of the analyzed spectra exhibit breakpoints near the electron gyroscale ρe, followed by steeper power-law-like spectra. We show that the scaling below the electron breakpoint cannot be determined unambiguously due to instrumental limitations that we discuss in detail. We compare our results to those reported in other studies and discuss their implications for the physical mechanisms involved and for theoretical modeling of energy dissipation in the SW.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c87c5fc8c30d851ec7e93530bb01167dcf1dc18

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In Artificial Intelligence

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Citations in the corpus

Nature of Kinetic Scale Turbulence in the Earth's Magnetosheath (2016, background): “…before steepening at electron scales, similar to solar wind observations (e.g., Alexandrova et al. 2009; Kiyani et al. 2009; Chen et al. 2010a, 2012; Sahraoui et al. 2013) and kinetic Alfvén turbulence simulations (e.g., Howes et al. 2011; Boldyrev & Perez 2012), and not far from the k −8/3 ⊥…”
Recent progress in astrophysical plasma turbulence from solar wind observations (2016, background): “While the shape of the magnetic spectrum close to ion scales and close to electron scales is somewhat variable, the range in between is generally found to be a power law with a typical spectral index around −2.8 (e.g., Alexandrova et al. 2009; Sahraoui et al. 2013).”