This study investigates chaotic diffusion in multi-scale turbulence driven by nonlinear wave-particle resonance coupling. Turbulent waves with distinct characteristic wavelengths across scales coherently interact with charged particles when their phase velocities match the particles' velocities. A multi-wavenumber mapping framework is developed to model chaotic transport under multi-scale turbulence. By analytically deriving velocity correlation functions, we quantify the diffusion coefficient under conditions of cross-scale wave intensity parity. A critical analysis reveals that chaotic dynamics at smaller scales prove insufficient to completely erase phase-space correlations established by large-scale turbulent components. The largest-scale turbulence components dominate deviations from quasi-linear (QL) theory predictions, establishing a scale-dependent hierarchy in chaotic transport. Mere reduction of inter-wave phase velocity spacing for small-scale components cannot recover QL diffusion at finite wave amplitudes in multi-scale turbulence. Incorporating a larger-scale component into a small-scale-driven strong chaotic system can induce non-QL diffusion. Specifically, for two-scale turbulence, the QL approximation systematically underestimates transport. Increasing the number of smaller-scale components with strong overlap parameters drives convergence toward the QL approximation. This framework provides a methodology for analyzing resonance-driven turbulence in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.
As the fundamental physical process with many astrophysical implications, the diffusion of cosmic rays (CRs) is determined by their interaction with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. We consider the magnetic mirroring effect arising from MHD turbulence on the diffusion of CRs. Due to the intrinsic superdiffusion of turbulent magnetic fields, CRs with large pitch angles that undergo mirror reflection, i.e., bouncing CRs, are not trapped between magnetic mirrors, but move diffusively along the turbulent magnetic field, leading to a new type of parallel diffusion, i.e., mirror diffusion. This…
Transport of energetic electrons in the heliosphere is governed by resonant interaction with plasma waves, for for electrons with sub-GeV kinetic energies specifically with dispersive modes in the whistler regime. We have performed Particle in Cell simulations of kinetic turbulence with test-particle electrons. The pitch-angle diffusions coefficients of these test-particles have been analyzed and compared to an analytical model for left- and right-handed polarized wavemodes.
This paper studies cosmic ray (CR) transport in magneto hydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. CR transport is strongly dependent on the properties of the magnetic turbulence. We perform test particle simulations to study the interactions of CR with both total MHD turbulence and decomposed MHD modes. The spatial diffusion coefficients and the pitch angle scattering diffusion coefficients are calculated from the test particle trajectories in turbulence. Our results confirm that the fast modes dominate the CR propagation, whereas Alfvén and slow modes are much less efficient and have shown similar pitch…
A two-field Hamiltonian gyrofluid model for kinetic Alfvén waves retaining ion finite Larmor radius corrections, parallel magnetic field fluctuations and electron inertia, is used to study turbulent cascades from the MHD to the sub-ion scales. Special attention is paid to the case of imbalance between waves propagating along or opposite to the ambient magnetic field. For weak turbulence in the absence of electron inertia, kinetic equations for the spectral density of the conserved quantities (total energy and generalized cross-helicity) are obtained. They provide a global description, matching…
The transport dynamo mechanism, which describes the magnetic field generation by diffusion flow is reviewed. In this mechanism, the cross-field transport caused by the random motion of fluid breaks the frozen-flux approximation, and the resulting cross-field diffusion that can generate the magnetic field. Turbulence can play an important role in inducing such random motion. Compared to the conventional dynamo mechanism, this transport mechanism has several special features that the field generation can occur on a very slow time scale because the mechanism is mediated by diffusion and that this…
