Imprints of expansion onto the local anisotropy of solar wind turbulence

TL;DR

This study uses 3D MHD simulations to show that solar wind expansion significantly influences the local anisotropy of turbulence, aligning synthetic observations with actual solar wind data and revealing the impact of expansion on fluctuation confinement.

Contribution

It demonstrates that solar wind expansion affects local anisotropy in turbulence, improving the match between simulations and observations, and highlights the importance of considering expansion in turbulence analysis.

Findings

Expansion reduces the radial magnetic field component at all scales.

Only with expansion do synthetic observations match solar wind anisotropy.

Anisotropy varies significantly with the orientation of increments relative to the radial.

Abstract

We study the anisotropy of II-order structure functions defined in a frame attached to the local mean field in three-dimensional (3D) direct numerical simulations of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, including or not the solar wind expansion. We simulate spacecraft flybys through the numerical domain by taking increments along the radial (wind) direction that forms an angle of $45^o$ with the ambient magnetic field. We find that only when expansion is taken into account, do the synthetic observations match the 3D anisotropy observed in the solar wind, including the change of anisotropy with scales. Our simulations also show that the anisotropy changes dramatically when considering increments oblique to the radial directions. Both results can be understood by noting that expansion reduces the radial component of the magnetic field at all scales, thus confining fluctuations in the plane perpendicular to the radial. Expansion is thus shown to affect not only the (global) spectral anisotropy, but also the local anisotropy of second-order structure functions by influencing the distribution of the local mean field, which enters this higher-order statistics.