Princeton Center for Heliophysics Seminar

One of the central questions in astrophysical plasmas revolves around understanding how turbulence contributes to plasma heating, particularly regarding the partitioning of this energy between protons and electrons. Since space plasmas exhibit weak collisionality there is no consensus around a unified definition of "heating" and the identification of clear mechanisms responsible for heating processes. In this talk, we discuss some of the measures commonly associated with dissipation and heating, while also touching upon the issue of reversibility. For the first time using in-situ data, we show that turbulence plays a central role in heating protons and electrons at kinetic scales via the pressure strain interaction. Through a comprehensive statistical analysis, we identify the effective dissipative scales: notably, while ion heating predominantly occurs at ion scales, electron heating is more evenly distributed across the kinetic range.