Princeton Center for Heliophysics Seminar

Plasmas throughout the Universe are filled with complex, highly nonlinear turbulent fluctuations that transfer energy from the large driving scales down to the smallest scales where energy can be most efficiently dissipated. In the absence of collisions, one of the key challenges is understanding how the multi-fluid and kinetic effects at scales below the characteristic ion and electron scales in the plasma shape the nonlinear dynamics and ultimately lead to energy conversion and dissipation of the turbulent fluctuations. Over the past nine years, NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission has provided us with a more detailed look at these dynamics than ever before by directly probing length and timescale well below the proton scales and approaching the electron scales. In this talk we will discuss the insights that have been gained from the high-resolution measurements from MMS – with a particular focus on understanding the turbulent electric fields, as well as the small-scale turbulence-driven reconnection events and instabilities embedded within the turbulent fluctuations. We will finally highlight some recent efforts to further probe the electron scale fluctuations and address key open questions with the next-generation of space-based plasma measurements.