Electron Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence: Universal Features

TL;DR

This paper investigates the universal features of electron magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, revealing consistent scaling laws, intermittency effects, and dissipative anomalies across different regimes, suggesting fundamental underlying principles.

Contribution

It introduces fractal and multi-fractal models to analyze turbulence intermittency and confirms the universality of several key features in EMHD turbulence.

Findings

Confirmation of dissipative anomaly in EMHD turbulence

Universality of equipartition spectrum and scaling laws

Intermittency corrections to the velocity and magnetic field gradients

Abstract

The energy cascade of electron magnetohydrodynamic (EMHD) turbulence is considered. Fractal and multi-fractal models for the energy dissipation field are used to determine the spatial intermittency corrections to the scaling behavior in the high-wavenumber (electron hydrodynamic limit) and low-wavenumber (magnetization limit) asymptotic regimes of the inertial range. Extrapolation of the multi-fractal scaling down to the dissipative microscales confirms in these asymptotic regimes a dissipative anomaly previously indicated by the numerical simulations of EMHD turbulence. Several basic features of the EMHD turbulent system are found to be universal which seem to transcend the existence of the characteristic length scale $d_e$ (which is the electron skin depth) in the EMHD problem---(i) equipartition spectrum, (ii) Reynolds-number scaling of the dissipative microscales, (iii) scaling of the probability distribution function (PDF) of the electron-flow velocity (or magnetic field) gradient (even with intermittency corrections), (iv) dissipative anomaly, (v) critical exponent scaling.