Competing Mechanisms of Plasma Transport in Inhomogeneous Configurations with Velocity Shear: The Solar-Wind Interaction with Earth’s Magnetosphere

Faganello, Matteo; Califano, Francesco; Пегораро, Ф.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.100.015001

Cited by 61 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…From Eqs. (14) & (15) in Ref. 25 using parameters ν1 = 0.007, ν2 = 0.007 and ν3 = 0.4, the resistivity is η ≈ 10 −3 for both the adiabatic and isothermal cases with the setup described below.…”

Section: Mhd Stagger Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Nonlinear evolution of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability: From fluid to kinetic modeling

et al. 2013

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The nonlinear evolution of collisionless plasmas is typically a multi-scale process where the energy is injected at large, fluid scales and dissipated at small, kinetic scales. Accurately modelling the global evolution requires to take into account the main micro-scale physical processes of interest. This is why comparison of different plasma models is today an imperative task aiming at understanding cross-scale processes in plasmas. We report here the first comparative study of the evolution of a magnetized shear flow, through a variety of different plasma models by using magnetohydrodynamic, Hall-MHD, two-fluid, hybrid kinetic and full kinetic codes. Kinetic relaxation effects are discussed to emphasize the need for kinetic equilibriums to study the dynamics of collisionless plasmas in non trivial configurations. Discrepancies between models are studied both in the linear and in the nonlinear regime of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, to highlight the effects of small scale processes on the nonlinear evolution of collisionless plasmas. We illustrate how the evolution of a magnetized shear flow depends on the relative orientation of the fluid vorticity with respect to the magnetic field direction during the linear evolution when kinetic effects are taken into account. Even if we found that small scale processes differ between the different models, we show that the feedback from small, kinetic scales to large, fluid scales is negligable in the nonlinear regime. This study show that the kinetic modeling validates the use of a fluid approach at large scales, which encourages the development and use of fluid codes to study the nonlinear evolution of magnetized fluid flows, even in the colisionless regime.

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Section: Mhd Stagger Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Nonlinear evolution of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability: From fluid to kinetic modeling

et al. 2013

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“…1). In the sub-magnetosonic case, instead, the vortices are composed of spiralling arms of alternating right-side and left-side values of the density, as discussed in Faganello et al (2008a) and in Tenerani et al (2010) in configurations with and, respectively, without an in-plane magnetic field component. The characteristic value of the vortex density is of the order of the magnetospheric density.…”

Section: Simulation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, they showed that the onset of secondary reconnection instabilities can disrupt the vortex structure and change the large scale evolution of the configuration significantly. In the low latitude magnetopause context, the Rayleigh Taylor (RT) instability (Matsumoto and Hoshino, 2004;Faganello et al, 2008a) is another important secondary instability that can develop inside the KH vortices. This instability is driven by the alternating density layers consisting of solar wind and of magnetosphere plasma respectively which are rolled up in the KH vortex arms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the initial density difference is large enough, the vortex centrifugal acceleration, acting as an "effective gravity", makes the vortex arms RT unstable. During the nonlinear evolution of the vortices, secondary fluid instabilities (RT but also KH) compete with the vortex pairing which is expected to occur in a KH vortex chain system (Faganello et al, 2008a). The onset of the RT instability can interrupt the vortex pairing process and can eventually lead to the generation of a turbulent mixing layer.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices and secondary instabilities in super-magnetosonic regimes

et al. 2011

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Abstract. The nonlinear behaviour of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is investigated with a two-fluid simulation code in both sub-magnetosonic and super-magnetosonic regimes in a two-dimensional configuration chosen so as to represent typical conditions observed at the Earth's magnetopause flanks. It is shown that in super-magnetosonic regimes the plasma density inside the vortices produced by the development of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is approximately uniform, making the plasma inside the vortices effectively stable against the onset of secondary instabilities. However, the relative motion of the vortices relative to the plasma flow can cause the formation of shock structures. It is shown that in the region where the shocks are attached to the vortex boundaries the plasma conditions change rapidly and develop large gradients that allow for the onset of secondary instabilities not observed in sub-magnetosonic regimes.

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“…Nonlinear simulations of the KH instability have been performed in MHD by Malagoli et al [38], Frank et al [27], Keppens et al [39], Ryu et al [28], Otto and Fairfield [14], Baty et al [29], Faganello et al [15], among others. These studies have frequently identified vortex formation in the early nonlinear regime, followed by field-induced vortex disruption, magnetic reconnection, turbulent breakdown, and relaxation to an equilibrium state.…”

Section: Prior Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Role of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the evolution of magnetized relativistic sheared plasma flows

Hamlin

Newman

2013

Phys. Rev. E

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Competing Mechanisms of Plasma Transport in Inhomogeneous Configurations with Velocity Shear: The Solar-Wind Interaction with Earth’s Magnetosphere

Cited by 61 publications

References 19 publications

Nonlinear evolution of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability: From fluid to kinetic modeling

Nonlinear evolution of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability: From fluid to kinetic modeling

Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices and secondary instabilities in super-magnetosonic regimes

Role of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the evolution of magnetized relativistic sheared plasma flows

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