Perpendicular ion heating in turbulence and reconnection: magnetic moment breaking by coherent fluctuations

Abstract

We study the interaction of an ion with a fluctuation in the electromagnetic fields that is localized in both space and time. We study the scale-dependence of the interaction in both space and time, deriving a generic form for the ion's energy change, which involves an exponential cutoff based on the characteristic timescale of the electromagnetic fluctuation. This leads to diffusion in energy in both $v_{\perp }$ and $v_{\parallel }$. We show how to apply our results to general plasma physics phenomena, and specifically to Alfvénic turbulence and to reconnection. Our theory can be viewed as a unification of previous models of stochastic ion heating, cyclotron heating, and reconnection heating in a single theoretical framework.

30 pages, 4 figures, replaced with version published in JPP

References in corpus (17)

• Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
• The Evolution and Role of Solar Wind Turbulence in the Inner Heliosphere
• Key Aspects of Coronal Heating
• Recent progress in astrophysical plasma turbulence from solar wind observations
• Magnetic reconnection as a driver for a sub-ion scale cascade in plasma turbulence
• Collisionless Reconnection in Magnetohydrodynamic and Kinetic Turbulence
• Hybrid-Kinetic Simulations of Ion Heating in Alfvénic Turbulence
• Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence mediated by reconnection
• Reconnection-Driven Energy Cascade in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence
• Plasmoid Instability in Forming Current Sheets
• A zone of preferential ion heating extends tens of solar radii from Sun
• On stochastic heating and its phase-space signatures in low-$\beta$ kinetic turbulence
• Strong Preferential Ion Heating is Limited to within the Solar Alfven Surface
• Statistical analysis of intermittency and its association with proton heating in the near Sun environment
• Evidence for the helicity barrier from measurements of the turbulence transition range in the solar wind
• A Unified Phenomenology of Ion Heating in Low-$\beta$ Plasmas: Test-Particle Simulations
• The effects of finite electron inertia on helicity-barrier-mediated turbulence