Phase-space entropy cascade and irreversibility of stochastic heating in nearly collisionless plasma turbulence

Abstract

We consider a nearly collisionless plasma consisting of a species of `test particles' in 1D-1V, stirred by an externally imposed stochastic electric field. The mean effect on the particle distribution function is stochastic heating. Accompanying this heating is the generation of fine-scale structure in the distribution function, which we characterize with the collisionless (Casimir) invariant $C_2 \propto \iint dx dv \, \langle f^2 \rangle$. We find that $C_2$ is transferred from large scales to small scales in both position and velocity space via a phase-space cascade enabled by both particle streaming and nonlinear interactions between particles and the stochastic electric field. We compute the steady-state fluxes and spectrum of $C_2$ in Fourier space, with $k$ and $s$ denoting spatial and velocity wavenumbers, respectively. Whereas even the linear phase mixing alone would lead to a constant flux of $C_2$ to high $s$ (towards the collisional dissipation range) at every $k$, the nonlinearity accelerates this cascade by intertwining velocity and position space so that the flux of $C_2$ is to both high $k$ and high $s$ simultaneously. Integrating over velocity (spatial) wavenumbers, the $k$-space ($s$-space) flux of $C_2$ is constant down to a dissipation length (velocity) scale that tends to zero as the collision frequency does, even though the rate of collisional dissipation remains finite. The resulting spectrum in the inertial range is a self-similar function in the $(k,s)$ plane, with power-law asymptotics at large $k$ and $s$. We argue that stochastic heating is made irreversible by this entropy cascade and that, while collisional dissipation accessed via phase mixing occurs only at small spatial scales rather than at every scale as it would in a linear system, the cascade makes phase mixing even more effective overall in the nonlinear regime than in the linear one.