1. VARIANCE ANISOTROPY IN KINETIC PLASMAS.
- Author
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Tulasi N. Parashar, Sean Oughton, William H. Matthaeus, and Minping Wan
- Subjects
- *
ANISOTROPY , *PLASMA gases , *KINETIC energy , *POLARIZATION (Nuclear physics) , *SOLAR wind - Abstract
Solar wind fluctuations admit well-documented anisotropies of the variance matrix, or polarization, related to the mean magnetic field direction. Typically, one finds a ratio of perpendicular variance to parallel variance of the order of 9:1 for the magnetic field. Here we study the question of whether a kinetic plasma spontaneously generates and sustains parallel variances when initiated with only perpendicular variance. We find that parallel variance grows and saturates at about 5% of the perpendicular variance in a few nonlinear times irrespective of the Reynolds number. For sufficiently large systems (Reynolds numbers) the variance approaches values consistent with the solar wind observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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