Abstrakt
Kinetic-scale fluctuations in magnetized collisionless plasmas, such as a solar wind, attract attention owing to their vital role in the dynamics of the dissipation of free energy to random particle motion. As the free energy cascades in the inertial range of turbulence, fluctuations at ion characteristic scales become more compressible.
Measurements show that these fluctuations possess highly oblique propagation angles with respect to the background magnetic field and follow theoretical predictions for kinetic Alfven waves (KAWs). We performed a. large (465 cases) statistical study of normalized fluctuations of the density, bulk velocity, and magnetic field around ion gyroscale and concentrated on (i) their compressibility, (ii) the ratio of density and magnetic field fluctuations, and (iii) the ratio of density and velocity fluctuations.
We find that observed fluctuations follow the two-fluid prediction for KAWs generally, but the spread of measured values around their theoretical predictions is large. The analysis of measurement uncertainties shows that the difference between the observed and predicted levels of fluctuations cannot be fully explained by these uncertainties and that the nature of solar wind fluctuations is more complex.