Kinetic plasma turbulence in the fast solar wind measured by Cluster

Abstract

The k-filtering technique and wave polarization analysis are applied to Cluster magnetic field data to study plasma turbulence at the scale of the ion gyroradius in the fast solar wind. Waves are found propagating in directions nearly perpendicular to the background magnetic field at such scales. The frequencies of these waves in the solar wind frame are much smaller than the proton gyro-frequency. After the wave vector $\mathbf{k}$ is determined at each spacecraft frequency $f_{sc}$, wave polarization property is analyzed in the plane perpendicular to $\mathbf{k}$. Magnetic fluctuations have $\delta B_{\perp }>\delta B_{\parallel }$ (here the $\parallel$ and $\perp$ refer to the background magnetic field ${\mathbf{B}}_0$). The wave magnetic field has right-handed polarization at propagation angles ${\theta }_{\mathbf{kB}}<90^{\circ }$ and $>90^{\circ }$. The magnetic field in the plane perpendicular to ${\mathbf{B}}_0$ however has no clear sense of a dominant polarization but local rotations. We discuss the merits and limitations of linear kinetic Aflvén waves (KAWs) and coherent Alfvén vortices in the interpretation of the data. We suggest that the fast solar wind turbulence may be populated with KAWs, small scale current sheets and Alfvén vortices at ion kinetic scales.

6 pages, 5 figures, Accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (2)

• Kinetic Simulations of Magnetized Turbulence in Astrophysical Plasmas
• Solar wind turbulent spectrum at plasma kinetic scales

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