SH51A-4139:
The anisotropic nature of the intermittent turbulence spectra in the solar wind

Friday, 19 December 2014
Chuan-Yi Tu1, Xin Wang1, Jiansen He1, Eckart Marsch2 and Linghua Wang1, (1)Peking University, Beijing, China, (2)University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany
Abstract:
Intermittent structures in the solar wind turbulence carry important information on the turbulent non-linear dynamics and the heating effect of solar wind. However, the intermittency on small scales was rarely studied. Here we present a study of intermittent structures in the small timescale from 5 seconds to 100 seconds using the data from WIND observations in the high-speed solar wind. We find that the intermittent structures dominate the magnetic field turbulence in the scale. In this scale, the power spectrum of the intermittent structures with PVI >1 appears to be anisotropic with regards to the angle θRB between the direction of the local background magnetic field and the radial direction. The anisotropic nature in this sub-range is presented as follows: 1. At the scale τ=12s, the power spectral density of the intermittency withθRB = 84o-90o is one time larger than that of the intermittency with θRB =0o-6o; 2. The power spectrum becomes flatter as θRB increases, with an index of -2 at θRB =0o-6o and index of -1.6 at θRB =84o-90o; 3. The most probable value of the proton temperature distribution of the intermittent structures is 2.1×105K, higher than the most probable proton temperature for the general solar wind (1.9×105K); 4. The most probable value of the proton temperature of the intermittency with θRB =70o-90o is 2.2×105K, clearly higher than that with θRB =0o-20o, which is 2.0×105K. We think that the intermittent structures in the scale from 5s to 100s and their anisotropic spectral nature could be related to the non-linear interactions in the MHD turbulence, and they may have some influence on the dissipation processes in the solar wind turbulence.