| Name: | Kirit Makwana |
| Affiliation: | Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad |
| Conference ID : | ASI2024_584 |
| Title : | Existence of kinetic Alfven wave cascade in sub-ion range solar wind plasma turbulence |
| Authors : | Kirit D. Makwana1, Johan Sharma1 |
| Authors Affiliation: | 1 Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Kandi, Sangareddy, Telangana 502284, India |
| Mode of Presentation: | Poster |
| Abstract Category : | Sun, Solar System, Exoplanets, and Astrobiology |
| Abstract : | The solar wind is an excellent laboratory for the study of plasma turbulence. The kinetic range of this turbulence plays an important role in the solar wind heating and acceleration. It has been proposed that Kinetic Alfven waves (KAWs) or whistler waves could mediate this kinetic range. The KAW has been simulated with a 3D kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) code. The initial condition is a superposition of KAWs at large scale using the two-fluid KAW eigenvector relations between density, velocity, electric and magnetic fields. The simulation develops a cascade of energy at smaller scales (higher wavenumbers). The relations between the various field components are calculated at the smaller scales. They match well with KAW relations rather than the whistler wave relations. The turbulence spectrum that is generated appears to match with the observed transition-range spectrum in the solar wind. This shows that KAWs can explain some features of the sub-ion range plasma turbulence. |
