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Wave properties and instabilities in a magnetized, anisotropic, collisionless, rarefied hot plasma in fluid approximation are studied, using the 16-moments set of the transport equations obtained from the Vlasov equations. These equations differ from the CGL-MHD fluid model (single fluid equations by Chew, Goldberger, and Low, 1956) by including two anisotropic heat flux evolution equations, where the fluxes invalidate the double polytropic CGL laws. We derived the general dispersion relation for linear compressible wave modes. Besides the classic incompressible fire hose modes there appear four types of compressible wave modes: two fast and slow mirror modes - strongly modified compared to the CGL model - and two thermal modes. In the presence of initial heat fluxes along the magnetic field the wave properties become different for the waves running forward and backward with respect to the magnetic field. The well known discrepancies between the results of the CGL-MHD fluid model and the kinetic theory are now removed: i) The mirror slow mode instability criterion is now the same as that in the kinetic theory. ii) Similarly, in kinetic studies there appear two kinds of fire hose instabilities - incompressible and compressible ones. These two instabilities can arise for the same plasma parameters, and the instability of the new compressible oblique fire hose modes can become dominant. The compressible fire hose instability is the result of the resonance coupling of three retrograde modes - two thermal modes and a fast mirror mode. The results can be applied to the theory of solar and stellar coronal and wind models.
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We present the first study of the formation and dissipation of current sheets at electron scales in a wave-driven, weakly collisional, 3D kinetic turbulence simulation. We investigate the relative importance of dissipation associated with collisionless damping via resonant wave-particle interactions versus dissipation in small-scale current sheets in weakly collisional plasma turbulence. Current sheets form self-consistently from the wave-driven turbulence, and their filling fraction is well correlated to the electron heating rate. However, the weakly collisional nature of the simulation necessarily implies that the current sheets are not significantly dissipated via Ohmic dissipation. Rather, collisionless damping via the Landau resonance with the electrons is sufficient to account for the measured heating as a function of scale in the simulation, without the need for significant Ohmic dissipation. This finding suggests the possibility that the dissipation of the current sheets is governed by resonant wave-particle interactions and that the locations of current sheets correspond spatially to regions of enhanced heating.
Hybrid-kinetic numerical simulations of firehose and mirror instabilities in a collisionless plasma are performed in which pressure anisotropy is driven as the magnetic field is changed by a persistent linear shear $S$. For a decreasing field, it is found that mostly oblique firehose fluctuations grow at ion Larmor scales and saturate with energies $sim$$S^{1/2}$; the pressure anisotropy is pinned at the stability threshold by particle scattering off microscale fluctuations. In contrast, nonlinear mirror fluctuations are large compared to the ion Larmor scale and grow secularly in time; marginality is maintained by an increasing population of resonant particles trapped in magnetic mirrors. After one shear time, saturated order-unity magnetic mirrors are formed and particles scatter off their sharp edges. Both instabilities drive sub-ion-Larmor--scale fluctuations, which appear to be kinetic-Alfv{e}n-wave turbulence. Our results impact theories of momentum and heat transport in astrophysical and space plasmas, in which the stretching of a magnetic field by shear is a generic process.
A pair of nonlinear diffusion equations in Fourier space} is used to study the dynamics of strong Alfven-wave turbulence, from MHD to electron scales. Special attention is paid to the regime of imbalance between the energies of counter-propagating waves commonly observed in the solar wind (SW), especially in regions relatively close to the Sun. In the collisionless regime where dispersive effects arise at scales comparable to or larger than those where dissipation becomes effective, the imbalance produced by a given injection rate of generalized cross-helicity (GCH), which is an invariant, is much larger than in the corresponding collisional regime described by the usual (or reduced) magnetohydrodynamics. The combined effect of high imbalance and ion Landau damping induces a steep energy spectrum for the transverse magnetic field at sub-ion scales. This spectrum is consistent with observations in highly Alfvenic regions of the SW, such as trailing edges, but does not take the form of a transition range continued at smaller scales by a shallower spectrum. This suggests that the observed spectra displaying such a transition result from the superposition of contributions originating from various streams with different degrees of imbalance. Furthermore, when imbalanced energy injection is supplemented at small scales in an already fully developed turbulence, for example under the effect of magnetic reconnection, a significant enhancement of the imbalance at all scales is observed.
Particle condensates in general magnetic mirror geometries in high temperature plasma may be caused by a discrete resonance with thermal ion-acoustic background noise near mirror points. The resonance breaks the bounce symmetry, temporally locking the particles to the resonant wavelength. The relevant correlation lengths are the Debye length in parallel direction and the ion gyroradius in perpendicular direction.
Besides the relation between the wave vector $bm k$ and the complex frequency $omega$, wave polarization is useful for characterizing the properties of a plasma wave. The polarization of the electromagnetic fields, $delta bm E$ and $delta bm B$, have been widely used in plasma physics research. Here, we derive equations for the density and velocity perturbations, $delta n_s$ and $delta{bm v}_s$, respectively, of each species in the electromagnetic kinetic plasma dispersion relation by using their relation to the species current density perturbation $delta {bm J}_s$. Then we compare results with those of another commonly used plasma dispersion code (WHAMP) and with those of a multi-fluid plasma dispersion relation. We also summarize a number of useful polarization quantities, such as magnetic ellipticity, orientation of the major axis of the magnetic ellipse, various ratios of field energies and kinetic energies, species compressibility, parallel phase ratio, Alfven-ratio, etc., which are useful for plasma physics research, especially for space plasma studies. This work represents an extension of the BO electromagnetic dispersion code [H.S. Xie, Comput. Phys. Comm. 244 (2019) 343-371] to enhance its calculation of polarization and to include the capability of solving the electromagnetic magnetized multi-fluid plasma dispersion relation.
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