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Subdiffusive transport of charged particles perpendicular to the large scale magnetic field
Author(s) -
Qin G.,
Matthaeus W. H.,
Bieber J. W.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2001gl014035
Subject(s) - physics , perpendicular , magnetic field , diffusion , turbulence , charged particle , test particle , slab , condensed matter physics , scale (ratio) , field (mathematics) , computational physics , geophysics , ion , classical mechanics , mechanics , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics , pure mathematics , thermodynamics
Transport of charged particles across the mean magnetic field due to broad band, powerlaw‐distributed magnetic fluctuations is examined by direct computation of a large number of charged test particle trajectories. Fluctuations consist of a one dimensional slab spectrum with an additional 0.01 percent level of two dimensional fluctuations; the net field has no ignorable directions. We find that, at long times ( t ), the mean square displacements subdiffusively scale as ∼ t 1/2 . This confirms that perpendicular diffusion is suppressed when turbulence lacks strong three dimensional structure, in agreement with theories of Urch and of Kóta and Jokipii.