RESIDUAL ENERGY SPECTRUM OF SOLAR WIND TURBULENCE

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal Vol. 770; no. 2; pp. 1 - 10
• Main Authors: Chen, C H K, Bale, S D, Salem, C S, Maruca, B A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 20.06.2013
• Subjects: ANISOTROPY; ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY; Computational fluid dynamics; COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION; ENERGY SPECTRA; Fluctuation; FLUCTUATIONS; Fluid flow; FORECASTING; HELICITY; MAGNETIC FIELDS; MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS; NONLINEAR PROBLEMS; PLASMA; Residual energy; SOLAR WIND; TURBULENCE; Turbulent flow; VELOCITY
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/770/2/125

It has long been known that the energy in velocity and magnetic field fluctuations in the solar wind is not in equipartition. In this paper, we present an analysis of 5 yr of Wind data at 1 AU to investigate the reason for this. The residual energy (difference between energy in velocity and magnetic field fluctuations) was calculated using both the standard magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) normalization for the magnetic field and a kinetic version, which includes temperature anisotropies and drifts between particle species. It was found that with the kinetic normalization, the fluctuations are closer to equipartition, with a mean normalized residual energy of [sigma] sub(r)= -0.19 and mean Alfven ratio of r sub(A) = 0.71. The spectrum of residual energy, in the kinetic normalization, was found to be steeper than both the velocity and magnetic field spectra, consistent with some recent MHD turbulence predictions and numerical simulations, having a spectral index close to -1.9. The local properties of residual energy and cross helicity were also investigated, showing that globally balanced intervals with small residual energy contain local patches of larger imbalance and larger residual energy at all scales, as expected for nonlinear turbulent interactions.