2010/09/30 by C. H. K. Chen, A. Mallet, T. A. Yousef +2 · 137 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Fluid dynamics and aerodynamics studies #Magnetic field #Magnetohydrodynamic drive #Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence #Magnetohydrodynamics #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Solar wind #Spectral index #Turbulence #astro-ph.EP #physics.plasm-ph #physics.space-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18933.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 415(4), 3219-3226 (Oxford University Press) · 9 pages, 8 figures
openalex publication_date 2011/06/07 · arxiv created 2011/06/08 · arxiv updated 2012/08/20 · openalex created_date 2019/06/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the anisotropy of Alfvénic turbulence in the inertial range of slow solar wind and in both driven and decaying reduced magnetohydrodynamic simulations. A direct comparison is made by measuring the anisotropic second-order structure functions in both data sets. In the solar wind, the perpendicular spectral index of the magnetic field is close to −5/3. In the forced simulation, it is close to −5/3 for the velocity and −3/2 for the magnetic field. In the decaying simulation, it is −5/3 for both fields. The spectral index becomes steeper at small angles to the local magnetic field direction in all cases. We also show that when using the global rather than local mean field, the anisotropic scaling of the simulations cannot always be properly measured.