Energy conversion in turbulent weakly-collisional plasmas: Eulerian Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell simulations

Abstract

Kinetic simulations based on the Eulerian Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell (HVM) formalism permit the examination of plasma turbulence with useful resolution of the proton velocity distribution function (VDF). The HVM model is employed here to study the balance of energy, focusing on channels of conversion that lead to proton kinetic effects, including growth of internal energy and temperature anisotropies. We show that this Eulerian simulation approach, which is almost noise-free, is able to provide an accurate energy balance for protons. The results demonstrate explicitly that the recovered temperature growth is directly related to the role of the pressure-strain interaction. Furthermore, analysis of local spatial correlations indicates that the pressure-strain interaction is qualitatively associated with strong-current, high-vorticity structures, although other local terms -- such as the heat flux -- weaken the correlation. These numerical capabilities based on the Eulerian approach will enable deeper study of transfer and conversion channels in weakly collisional Vlasov plasmas.

Accepted for publication on Physics of Plasmas

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Quantifying Energy Conversion in Higher Order Phase Space Density Moments in Plasmas
• Contribution of Magnetic Reconnection Events to Energy Dissipation in Magnetosheath Turbulence
• Energy transport during 3D small-scale reconnection driven by anisotropic plasma turbulence
• Higher-order nonequilibrium term: Effective power density quantifying evolution towards or away from local thermodynamic equilibrium
• Current sheets, plasmoids and flux ropes in the heliosphere. Part II: Theoretical aspects