High-frequency Magnetic Fluctuations in Space Plasmas and the Role of Electron Landau Damping

Abstract

Abstract While low-frequency plasma fluctuations in the interplanetary space have been successfully described in the framework of classical turbulence, high-frequency fluctuations still represent a challenge for theoretical models. At these scales, kinetic plasma processes are at work, but although some of them have been identified in spacecraft measurements, their global effects on observable quantities are sometimes not fully understood. In this paper we present a new framework to the aim of describing the observed magnetic energy spectrum and directly identify in the data the presence of Landau damping as the main collisionless dissipative process in the solar wind.