Pressure-Strain Interaction: II. Decomposition in Magnetic Field-Aligned Coordinates

Abstract

In weakly collisional and collisionless magnetized plasmas, the pressure-strain interaction describes the rate of conversion between bulk flow and thermal energy density. In this study, we derive an analytical expression for the pressure-strain interaction in a coordinate system with an axis aligned with the local magnetic field. The result is eight groups of terms corresponding to different physical mechanisms that can contribute to the pressure-strain interaction. We provide a physical description of each term. The results are immediately of interest to weakly collisional and collisionless magnetized plasmas and the fundamental processes that happen therein, including magnetic reconnection, magnetized plasma turbulence, and collisionless shocks. The terms in the field-aligned coordinate decomposition are likely accessible to measurement with satellite observations.

12 pages, 1 figure, accepted to Physics of Plasmas

References in corpus (8)

• Statistics of Kinetic Dissipation in Earth's Magnetosheath -- MMS Observations
• Pressure-Strain Interaction as the Energy Dissipation Estimate in Collisionless Plasma
• Energy Dissipation in Turbulent Reconnection
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: I. On Compression, Deformation, and Implications For Pi-D
• Energy conversion in turbulent weakly-collisional plasmas: Eulerian Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell simulations
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: III. Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection
• In situ spacecraft observations of a structured electron diffusion region during magnetopause reconnection
• Ion-scale transition of plasma turbulence: Pressure-strain effect

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Pressure-Strain Interaction: I. On Compression, Deformation, and Implications For Pi-D
• Quantifying Energy Conversion in Higher Order Phase Space Density Moments in Plasmas
• Pressure-Strain Interaction: III. Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Magnetic Reconnection
• Higher-order nonequilibrium term: Effective power density quantifying evolution towards or away from local thermodynamic equilibrium
• Turbulent dynamo in the terrestrial magnetosheath