Francesco Valentini

Multi-dimensional Eulerian simulations of the hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell model[1] have been employed to investigate the role kinetic effects in turbulent plasmas at typical ion scales. Numerical results suggest that kinetic effects manifest through the deformation of the ion distribution function, with patterns of non-Maxwellian features being concentrated near regions of strong magnetic gradients. The velocity-space departure from Maxwellian of the ion velocity distributions has been also recovered in observational data from spacecraft. In a recent paper, Servidio et al.[2] investigated the velocity-space cascade process suggested by the highly structured shape of the ion velocity distribution detected by the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale mission. Through a tree-dimensional Hermite transform, these authors pointed out a power-law distribution of moments and provided a theoretical prediction for the scaling, based on a Kolmogorov approach. Here, the possibility of a velocity-space cascade is investigated in the strongly magnetized case, in kinetic simulations of turbulence at ion scales. Through the Hermite decomposition of the ion velocity distribution from the simulations, we found that (i) the plasma displays spectral anisotropy in velocity space, due to the presence of the background magnetic field, (ii) the distribution of energy is in agreement with the prediction in Ref. [2] and (iii) the activity in velocity space shows a clear intermittent character in space, being enhanced close to coherent structures, such as the reconnecting current sheets produced by turbulence. Finally, in order to explore the possible role of inter-particle collisions, collisional and collisionless simulations of plasma turbulence have been compared using Eulerian Hybrid Boltzmann-Maxwell simulations, that explicitly model the proton-proton collisions through the nonlinear Dougherty operator.

This talk has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 776262 (AIDA, www.aida-space.eu)

[1] Valentini, F. et al., J. Comput. Phys. 225 2007, 753-770

[2] Servidio, S. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 119 2017, 205101