Decay Regime Transitions in Plasma Shock-Turbulence Interaction

Plasma viscosity scales strongly with increasing temperature. Prior work has shown that turbulence in a compressing box of plasma can undergo a sudden viscous dissipation effect^a. For equivalent compression, a strong shock can achieve far higher temperature increases than a metric compression. In this work, we investigate how turbulence in a plasma could be dissipated after passage of a shock. Statistical analysis of plasma turbulence parameters shows the dissipation scales can increase across a shock, in contrast to the shock-turbulence interaction for neutral gases. A corresponding transition to different decay regimes may result in rapid dissipation of turbulence with potential for use as a novel method for inferring viscosity in plasmas.

^aS. Davidovits & N. J. Fisch, Phy. Rev. Lett. 116, 2016.