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Turbulent heating in an inhomogeneous magnetized plasma slab

Part of: Focus on Space Plasmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2018

Michael Barnes Open the ORCID record for Michael Barnes [Opens in a new window] ,
P. Abiuso  and
W. Dorland
Michael Barnes*
Affiliation:
Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 8ES, UK Euratom/CCFE Fusion Association, Culham Science Centre, Abingdon OX14 3DB, UK
P. Abiuso
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Fisica dell’Università di Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, I-56126 Pisa, Italy
W. Dorland
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: michael.barnes@physics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Observational evidence in space and astrophysical plasmas with a long collisional mean free path suggests that more massive charged particles may be preferentially heated. One possible mechanism for this is the turbulent cascade of energy from injection to dissipation scales, where the energy is converted to heat. Here we consider a simple system consisting of a magnetized plasma slab of electrons and a single ion species with a cross-field density gradient. We show that such a system is subject to an electron drift wave instability, known as the universal instability, which is stabilized only when the electron and ion thermal speeds are equal. For unequal thermal speeds, we find from quasilinear analysis and nonlinear simulations that the instability gives rise to turbulent energy exchange between ions and electrons that acts to equalize the thermal speeds. Consequently, this turbulent heating tends to equalize the component temperatures of pair plasmas and to heat ions to much higher temperatures than electrons for conventional mass-ratio plasmas.

Keywords

astrophysical plasmasplasma heatingplasma instabilities
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Plasma Physics , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , June 2018 , 905840306
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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