Propinquity of current and vortex structures: effects on collisionless plasma heating

Abstract

Intermittency of heating in weakly collisional plasma turbulence is an active subject of research, with significant potential impact on understanding of the solar wind, solar corona and astrophysical plasmas. Recent studies suggest a role of vorticity in plasma heating. In magnetohydrodynamics small scale vorticity is generated near current sheets and this effect persists in kinetic plasma, as demonstrated here with hybrid and fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. Furthermore, vorticity enhances local kinetic effects, with a generalized resonance condition selecting sign-dependent enhancements or reductions of proton heating and thermal anisotropy. In such plasmas heating is correlated with vorticity and current density, but more strongly with vorticity. These results help explain several prior results that find kinetic effects and energization near to, but not centered on, current sheets. Evidently intermittency in kinetic plasma involves multiple physical quantities, and the associated coherent structures and nonthermal effects are closely related.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (3)

• Turbulence and cooling in galaxy cluster cores
• Magnetic Discontinuities in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence and in the Solar Wind
• Energy dynamics and current sheet structure in fluid and kinetic simulations of decaying magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

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• Clustering of Intermittent Magnetic and Flow Structures near Parker Solar Probe's First Perihelion -- A Partial-Variance-of-Increments Analysis
• Revisiting a classic: the Parker-Moffatt problem
• Magnetospheric Multiscale Observation of Kinetic Signatures in the Alfvén Vortex
• Observations of heating along intermittent structures in the inner heliosphere from PSP data
• Space-filter techniques for quasi-neutral hybrid-kinetic models
• Intermittency and Ion Temperature-Anisotropy Instabilities: Simulation and Magnetosheath Observation
• Current sheets, plasmoids and flux ropes in the heliosphere. Part II: Theoretical aspects
• Ion-scale transition of plasma turbulence: Pressure-strain effect