Cross-field transport in Goldreich-Sridhar MHD turbulence

Abstract

I derive analytically the temporal dependence of the perpendicular transport coefficient of a charged particle in the three-dimensional anisotropic turbulence conjectured by Goldreich-Sridhar by implementing multi-spacecraft constraints on the turbulence power spectrum. The particle motion away from the turbulent local field line is assessed as gradient/curvature drift of the guiding-center and compared with the magnetic field line random walk. At inertial scales much smaller than the turbulence outer scale, particles decorrelate from field lines in a free-streaming motion, with no diffusion. In the solar wind at $1$ AU, for energy sufficiently small ($<1$ keV protons), the perpendicular average displacement due to field line tangling generally dominates over two decades of turbulent scales. However, for higher energies ($\simeq 25$ MeV protons) within the range of multi-spacecraft measurements, the longitudinal spread originating from transport due to gradient/curvature drift reaches up to $\simeq 10^{\circ }-20^{\circ }$. This result highlights the role of the perpendicular transport in the interpretation of interplanetary and interstellar data.

25 pages, 3 figures, PRE in press