Studying the properties of compressible MHD turbulence by synchrotron fluctuation statistics

Abstract

We study the observable properties of compressible MHD turbulence covering different turbulence regimes, based on synthetic synchrotron observations arising from 3D MHD numerical simulations. Using the synchrotron emissivity and intensity, we first explore how the cosmic ray spectral indices affect the measurements of turbulence properties by employing normalized correlation functions. We then study how the anisotropy of synchrotron total and polarization intensities arising from three fundamental MHD modes vary with the viewing angle, i.e., the angle between the mean magnetic field and the line of sight. We employ the ratio of quadrupole moment to the monopole one (QM) for this purpose. Our numerical results demonstrate that: (1) the two-point correlation function of synchrotron statistics for the arbitrary cosmic ray spectral index is related to the special case of magnetic field index $\gamma=2$ in agreement with the analytical formulae provided by Lazarian \& Pogosyan (2012); (2) the anisotropy of synchrotron total and polarization intensities arising from Alfv\'en and slow modes increases with the increase of the viewing angle, while that of fast mode remains almost unchanged with the viewing angle; (3) the analytical formulae of synchrotron intensities for studying turbulence can be applied to describing statistics of polarization intensities, and the QM can be successfully used to recover turbulence anisotropy. This study validates Lazarian \& Pogosyan's analytical approach and opens a way to study turbulence from observations.