The dissipation of solar wind turbulent fluctuations at electron scales

Abstract

We present two-dimensional fully-kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulations of decaying electromagnetic fluctuations. The computational box is such that wavelengths ranging from electron to ion gyroradii are resolved. The parameters used are realistic for the solar wind, and the ion to electron mass ratio is physical. The understanding of the dissipation of turbulent fluctuations at small scales is thought to be a crucial mechanism for solar wind acceleration and coronal heating. The computational results suggest that a power law cascade of magnetic fluctuations could be sustained up to scales of the electron Larmor radius and smaller. We analyse the simulation results in the light of the Vlasov linear theory, and we comment on the particle heating. The dispersion curves of lightly damped modes in this regime suggest that a linear mechanism could be responsible for the observed steepening of power spectra at electron scales, but a straightforward identification of turbulent fluctuations as an ensemble of linear modes is not possible

to appear in Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (3)

• Kinetic Simulations of Magnetized Turbulence in Astrophysical Plasmas
• Multi-scale Hall-MHD turbulence in the solar wind
• Cascade and Damping of Alfvén-Cyclotron Fluctuations: Application to Solar Wind Turbulence Spectrum

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• Extended MHD turbulence and its applications to the solar wind
• Variability Of The Magnetic Field Power Spectrum In The Solar Wind At Electron Scales
• Anisotropies of the magnetic field fluctuations at kinetic scales in the solar wind : Cluster observations
• Spectral properties and energy transfer at kinetic scales in collisionless plasma turbulence
• Space-filter techniques for quasi-neutral hybrid-kinetic models
• Eulerian simulations of electrostatic waves in plasmas with a single sign of charge
• Anisotropic electron heating in turbulence-driven magnetic reconnection in the near-Sun solar wind