arXiv · 1501.01664
Temporal Intermittency of Energy Dissipation in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence
Abstract
Energy dissipation in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is known to be highly intermittent in space, being concentrated in sheet-like coherent structures. Much less is known about intermittency in time, another fundamental aspect of turbulence which has great importance for observations of solar flares and other space/astrophysical phenomena. In this Letter, we investigate the temporal intermittency of energy dissipation in numerical simulations of MHD turbulence. We consider four-dimensional spatiotemporal structures, "flare events", responsible for a large fraction of the energy dissipation. We find that although the flare events are often highly complex, they exhibit robust power-law distributions and scaling relations. We find that the probability distribution of dissipated energy has a power law index close to -1.75, similar to observations of solar flares, indicating that intense dissipative events dominate the heating of the system. We also discuss the temporal asymmetry of flare events as a signature of the turbulent cascade.
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Vladimir Zhdankin, Dmitri A. Uzdensky, Stanislav Boldyrev. 2015-01-07. Temporal Intermittency of Energy Dissipation in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.114.065002
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