The Structure of Plasma Heating in Gyrokinetic Alfvénic Turbulence

Abstract

We analyze plasma heating in weakly collisional kinetic Alfvén wave (KAW) turbulence using high resolution gyrokinetic simulations spanning the range of scales between the ion and the electron gyroradii. Real space structures that have a higher than average heating rate are shown not to be confined to current sheets. This novel result is at odds with previous studies, which use the electromagnetic work in the local electron fluid frame, i.e. $\mathbf{J}\cdot (\mathbf{E}+{\mathbf{v}}_e\times \mathbf{B})$, as a proxy for turbulent dissipation to argue that heating follows the intermittent spatial structure of the electric current. Furthermore, we show that electrons are dominated by parallel heating while the ions prefer the perpendicular heating route. We comment on the implications of the results presented here.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• New Measure of the Dissipation Region in Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection
• Multiscale nature of the dissipation range in gyrokinetic simulations of Alfvénic turbulence
• Kinetic cascade beyond magnetohydrodynamics of solar wind turbulence in two-dimensional hybrid simulations
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