Structures and Intermittency in Small Scales Solar Wind Turbulence

Journal Article · Thu Mar 25 00:00:00 EDT 2010 · AIP Conference Proceedings

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3395820· OSTI ID:21371708

Sahraoui, Fouad ^[1]; Goldstein, Melvyn ^[1]

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1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 20771 (United States)

Several observations in space plasmas have reported the presence of coherent structures at different plasma scales. Structure formation is believed to result from nonlinear interactions between the plasma modes, which depend strongly on their phase synchronization. Despite this important role of the phases in turbulence, very limited work has been devoted to study the phases as potential tracers of nonlinearities in comparison with the wealth of literature on power spectra of turbulence where phases are totally missed. The reason why the phases are seldom used is probably because they usually appear to be completely mixed (due to their dependence on an arbitrary time origin and to 2pi periodicity). To handle the phases properly, a new method based on using surrogate data has been developed recently to detect coherent structures in magnetized plasmas [Sahraoui, PRE, 2008]. Here, we show new applications of the technique to study the nature (weak vs strong, self-similar vs intermittent) of the small scale turbulence in the solar wind using the Cluster observations.

• OSTI ID: 21371708
• Journal Information: AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1216, Issue 1; Conference: 12. international solar wind conference, Saint-Malo (France), 21-26 Jun 2009; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.3395820; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0094-243X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
ASTROPHYSICS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
INTERPLANETARY MAGNETIC FIELDS
NONLINEAR PROBLEMS
PERIODICITY
PLASMA
SOLAR WIND
SPACE VEHICLES
SYNCHRONIZATION
TURBULENCE
EVALUATION
MAGNETIC FIELDS
PHYSICS
SOLAR ACTIVITY
STELLAR ACTIVITY
STELLAR WINDS
VARIATIONS
VEHICLES