Internally Driven $\beta$-plane Plasma Turbulence Using the Hasegawa-Wakatani System

Abstract

General problem of plasma turbulence can be formulated as advection of potential vorticity (PV), which handles flow self-organization, coupled to a number of other fields, whose gradients provide free energy sources. Therefore, focusing on PV evolution separates the underlying linear instability from the flow self-organization, and clarifies key spatial scales in terms of balances between various time scales. Considering the Hasegawa-Wakatani model as a minimal, nontrivial model of plasma turbulence where the energy is injected internally by a linear instability, we find that the critical wavenumber $k_c=C/\kappa$ where $C$ is the adiabaticity parameter and $\kappa$ is the normalized density gradient separates the adiabatic (or highly zonostrophic) behavior for large scales from the hydrodynamic behavior at small scales. In the adiabatic range the non-zonal part of the wave-number spectrum goes from $E(k)\propto {\gamma }_k{U}^{-1}{k}^{-2}$ around the peak to $E(k)\propto {\omega }_k^2{k}^{-3}$ in the "inertial" range, where ${\gamma }_k$ and ${\omega }_k$ are the linear growth and frequency and $U$ is the rms zonal velocity. This proposed spectrum fits very well for the large $k_c$ case, where the bulk of the spectrum is in the adiabatic range. In contrast for small $k_c$, we get the usual forward enstrophy cascade with $E(k)\propto {\epsilon }_W^{2/3}{k}^{-3}$, where ${\epsilon }_W$ is the enstrophy dissipation. In contrast for $k_c\approx 1$, the system transitions to hydrodynamic forward enstrophy cascade right after the injection range, with zonal flows at large scales and forward enstrophy cascade at small scales. It is argued that the ratio $R_{\beta }\equiv k_{\beta }/k_{\text{peak}}\approx k_c/k_{\text{peak}}$ where $k_{\text{peak}}$ is the peak wave-number can be defined as the zonostrophy parameter.