Nonlinear growth of firehose and mirror fluctuations in astrophysical plasmas.

In turbulent high-beta astrophysical plasmas (exemplified by the galaxy cluster plasmas), pressure-anisotropy-driven firehose and mirror fluctuations grow nonlinearly to large amplitudes, deltaB/B approximately 1, on a time scale comparable to the turnover time of the turbulent motions. The principl...

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Những tác giả chính: Schekochihin, A, Cowley, S, Kulsrud, R, Rosin, MS, Heinemann, T
Định dạng: Journal article
Ngôn ngữ:English
Được phát hành: 2008
Miêu tả
Tóm tắt:In turbulent high-beta astrophysical plasmas (exemplified by the galaxy cluster plasmas), pressure-anisotropy-driven firehose and mirror fluctuations grow nonlinearly to large amplitudes, deltaB/B approximately 1, on a time scale comparable to the turnover time of the turbulent motions. The principle of their nonlinear evolution is to generate secularly growing small-scale magnetic fluctuations that on average cancel the temporal change in the large-scale magnetic field responsible for the pressure anisotropies. The presence of small-scale magnetic fluctuations may dramatically affect the transport properties and, thereby, the large-scale dynamics of the high-beta astrophysical plasmas.