1,1,1,- 1University of Warwick, Physics, Coventry, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (conan.liptrott@warwick.ac.uk)
- 2Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales
Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is a fundamental process in astrophysical plasmas and plays a central role in energy dissipation and particle acceleration. In this work, we use high-resolution three-dimensional MHD simulations to investigate the relationship between turbulent cascade processes and the underlying structure of the magnetic and velocity fields. We determine whether regions of enhanced energy transfer and/or dissipation correlate with regions of enhanced strain- or rotation-dominated velocity and magnetic fields.
First, we apply the filtering approach [1] to coarse-grain simulation snapshots on a given scale, obtaining spatial fields of energy transfer and dissipation. We then characterise each field as strain- or rotation-dominated using the coarse-grained tensor invariants [2,3,4], with velocity and magnetic fields treated separately. Regions of intense dissipation and energy transfer are then characterised as either strain- or rotation-dominated. This analysis is repeated across scales from the inertial range to dissipation scales to explore the relative importance of strain- and rotation-dominated features in the turbulent cascade.
The results provide insight into the phenomenology of MHD turbulence, which will be discussed in the context of recent in situ observations.
[1] M. Germano, Turbulence: the filtering approach. Journal of Fluid Mechanics. (1992) doi:10.1017/S0022112092001733
[2] V. Quattrociocchi, G. Consolini, M. F. Marcucci, and M. Materassi, On geometrical invariants of the magnetic field gradient tensor in turbulent space plasmas: Scale variability in the inertial range, Astrophys. J. (2019) doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab1e47
[3] B, Hnat, S. C. Chapman, C. M. Liptrott, N. W. Watkins, Solar wind magnetohydrodynamic turbulence energy transfer rate ordered by magnetic field topology Phys. Rev. Res. (2025) doi:10.1103/9wb2-r437
[4] B, Hnat, S. C. Chapman, C. M. Liptrott, N. W. Watkins, Magnetic Topology of Actively Evolving and Passively Convecting Structures in the Turbulent Solar Wind Phys. Rev. Lett. (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.125101
How to cite: Liptrott, C., Chapman, S., Hnat, B., and Watkins, N.: Correlation Between Field Rotation–Strain Balance and Turbulent Cascade Processes in 3D MHD Simulations, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-11490, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-11490, 2026.
