Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

Turbulent motion in an artificial plasma inhomogeneity released in the ionosphere

C M Tchen

Show affiliations


Artificial barium plasmas released in the upper atmosphere are found to be turbulent. Since the plasma has mean field and density gradients transverse to the earth magnetic field, its spectrum possesses a production subrange, where the mean gradients supply energy to the turbulent motion. The nonlinearity provides a mode transfer across each spectrum, and the molecular diffusion by collisions leads to a dissipation of the energy in the spectrum. An analytical theory based on a repeated cascade has been developed by Tchen (1973). Since the mathematical foundation for the screening of ranks in the cascade, in the purpose of closing the turbulent hierarchy, has been elaborated in that theory, the basic physical foundation are emphasised of the transport processes and a comparison is made between experiments from the artificial plasma inhomogeneities released in the ionosphere and the theoretical result of finding a k-3 law over all subranges of the field spectrum, and of finding the power laws k-3, k-1 and k-5 in the production, inertia and dissipation subranges of the density spectrum, respectively. The comparison is favorable with the optical densitometry of the turbulent density fluctuations in the artificial plasma clouds experiments in the ionosphere.


PACS

94.20.wc Plasma motion; plasma convection; particle acceleration

94.05.Lk Turbulence

52.35.Ra Plasma turbulence

52.25.Fi Transport properties

52.35.Mw Nonlinear phenomena: waves, wave propagation, and other interactions (including parametric effects, mode coupling, ponderomotive effects, etc.)

Subjects

Plasma physics

Environmental and Earth science

Dates

Issue 12 (December 1973)



Related review articles

What's this?
View review articles related to this research to gain an insight into the key trends in this subject area. Related review articles are selected based on PACS/MSC codes, and are no more than three years old.

  1. Magnetospheres of planets with an intrinsic magnetic field

View by subject




Export








Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.