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Session: Heliophysics and the Solar System

Name: Prof. Loukas Vlahos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Coauthors: No coauthors were included.
Type: Oral
Title: Transport of particles in a fractal environment of coherent structures
Abstract:

In a fully developed strongly turbulent magnetized plasma, the coherent structures (current sheets, magnetic filaments, large-amplitude magnetic disturbances, vortices, shocks, tangential discontinuities, etc) form a fractal environment. We will show that the transport of particles in a finite volume of fully developed strong turbulence cannot be analyzed with the Fokker Planck Equation (FPE), and the estimate of the escape time of particles from a finite turbulent volume is not a trivial problem. We will explore several examples of test particle simulations in fully developed MHD strong turbulence from astrophysical and laboratory environments where particles are transported in space and energy. We will show that the proper transport equation to analyze the evolution of the distribution function of particles in a multi-scale environment is the Fractional Transport Equation (FTE), which can be constructed based on the synergy of an MHD code, capturing the large-scale evolution and the formation of the coherent structures, and a test particle code, capturing the kinetic evolution of the particles.