Temperature anisotropy instabilities driven by intermittent velocity shears in the solar wind
arXiv:2409.18849 · doi:10.1017/S0022377824001375
Abstract
Where and under what conditions the transfer of energy between electromagnetic fields and particles takes place in the solar wind remains an open question. We investigate the conditions that promote the growth of kinetic instabilities predicted by linear theory, to infer how turbulence and temperature-anisotropy-driven instabilities are interrelated. Using a large dataset from Solar Orbiter, we introduce the radial rate of strain, a novel measure computed from single-spacecraft data, that we interpret as a proxy for the double-adiabatic strain rate. The solar wind exhibits high absolute values of the radial rate of strain at locations with large temperature anisotropy. We measure the kurtosis and skewness of the radial rate of strain from the statistical moments to show that it is non-Gaussian for unstable intervals and increasingly intermittent at smaller scales with a power-law scaling. We conclude that the velocity field fluctuations in the solar wind contribute to the presence of temperature anisotropy sufficient to create potentially unstable conditions.
Accepted for publication in the Journal of Plasma Physics
References in corpus (42)
- Astrophysical gyrokinetics: kinetic and fluid turbulent cascades in magnetized weakly collisional plasmas
- The Anisotropy of MHD Alfvénic Turbulence
- Magnetic fluctuation power near proton temperature anisotropy instability thresholds in the solar wind
- The multi-scale nature of the solar wind
- Perpendicular Ion Heating by Low-Frequency Alfven-Wave Turbulence in the Solar Wind
- Intermittency in the solar wind turbulence through probability distribution functions of fluctuations
- Solar Wind Turbulence and the Role of Ion Instabilities
- Recent progress in astrophysical plasma turbulence from solar wind observations
- Firehose and Mirror Instabilities in a Collisionless Shearing Plasma
- Empirical Constraints on Proton and Electron Heating in the Fast Solar Wind
- Energy transfer, pressure tensor and heating of kinetic plasma
- Kinetic dissipation and anisotropic heating in a turbulent collisionless plasma
- Kinetic Signatures and Intermittent Turbulence in the Solar Wind Plasma
- High-resolution hybrid simulations of kinetic plasma turbulence at proton scales
- Modeling observations of solar coronal mass ejections with heliospheric imagers verified with the Heliophysics System Observatory
- Proton Kinetic Effects in Vlasov and Solar Wind Turbulence
- Anisotropy of Imbalanced Alfvenic Turbulence in Fast Solar Wind
- Multi-Species Measurements of the Firehose and Mirror Instability Thresholds in the Solar Wind
- Turbulence-driven ion beams in the magnetospheric Kelvin-Helmholtz instability
- Pressure anisotropy and small spatial scales induced by velocity shear
- A Dynamical Model of Plasma Turbulence in the Solar Wind
- Solar wind turbulent cascade from MHD to sub-ion scales: large-size 3D hybrid particle-in-cell simulations
- Collisionless Isotropization of the Solar-Wind Protons by Compressive Fluctuations and Plasma Instabilities
- Statistics of Kinetic Dissipation in Earth's Magnetosheath -- MMS Observations
- Prediction of the in situ coronal mass ejection rate for solar cycle 25: Implications for Parker Solar Probe in situ observations
- On the statistical properties of turbulent energy transfer rate in the inner Heliosphere
- A method for extracting the scaling exponents of a self-affine, non-Gaussian process from a finite length timeseries
- A stringent limit on the amplitude of Alfvénic perturbations in high-beta low-collisionality plasmas
- Local energy transfer rate and kinetic processes: the fate of turbulent energy in two-dimensional Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell numerical simulations
- Observations of heating along intermittent structures in the inner heliosphere from PSP data
- Self-Consistent Ion Cyclotron Anisotropy-Beta Relation for Solar Wind Protons
- Proton Kinetic Effects and Turbulent Energy Cascade Rate in the Solar Wind
- Amplitude limits and nonlinear damping of shear-Alfvén waves in high-beta low-collisionality plasmas
- Mirror instability in the turbulent solar wind
- Turbulence vs. fire hose instabilities: 3-D hybrid expanding box simulations
- Two-dimensional Hybrid Simulations of Kinetic Plasma Turbulence: Current and Vorticity vs Proton Temperature
- Exact law for compressible pressure-anisotropic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence: toward linking energy cascade and instabilities
- Conditions for proton temperature anisotropy to drive instabilities in the solar wind
- Interplay of Turbulence and Proton-Microinstability Growth in Space Plasmas
- A Measurement of the Effective Mean-Free-Path of Solar Wind Protons
- Kinetic Turbulence in Collisionless High-Beta Plasmas
- The effect of variations in magnetic field direction from turbulence on kinetic-scale instabilities