Spectra of magnetic turbulence in a relativistic plasma

Abstract

We present a phenomenological and numerical study of strong Alfvénic turbulence in a magnetically dominated collisionless relativistic plasma with a strong background magnetic field. In contrast with the non-relativistic case, the energy in such turbulence is contained in magnetic and electric fluctuations. We argue that such turbulence is analogous to turbulence in a strongly magnetized non-relativistic plasma in the regime of broken quasi-neutrality. Our 2D particle-in-cell numerical simulations of turbulence in a relativistic pair plasma find that the spectrum of the total energy has the scaling $k^{-3/2}$, while the difference between the magnetic and electric energies, the so-called residual energy, has the scaling $k^{-2.4}$. The electric and magnetic fluctuations at scale $\ell$ exhibit dynamic alignment with the alignment-angle scaling close to $\cos {\varphi }_{\ell }\propto {\ell }^{1/4}$. At scales smaller than the (relativistic) plasma inertial scale, the energy spectrum of relativistic inertial Alfvén turbulence steepens to $k^{-3.5}$.

8 pages, 3 figures. Published in ApJL. Changes relative to last version: some typos were corrected

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Radiative Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Turbulent Comptonization in Magnetized Black-Hole Coronae