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Suppression of Particle Drifts by Turbulence

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© 2007. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
, , Citation J. Minnie et al 2007 ApJ 670 1149 DOI 10.1086/522026

0004-637X/670/2/1149

Abstract

We present results from direct numerical simulations showing the suppression of the large-scale drift motion of an ensemble of charged particles in a nonuniform turbulent magnetic field. We find that when scattering is negligible, the ensemble average drift velocity is in the direction predicted by the usual guiding center theory. When scattering is very strong, we find that all large-scale drift motions vanish. For an intermediate amount of scattering we find that the antisymmetric drift velocity is typically suppressed by a larger amount than the antisymmetric drift coefficient. We show that the total drift motion of the ensemble is not necessarily completely contained in the antisymmetric part of the diffusion tensor. Because of the occurrence of scattering, knowledge of the spatial variation of the symmetric part of the diffusion tensor is also needed to fully describe the total drift motion of the ensemble.

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10.1086/522026