Evidence of entropy cascade in collisionless magnetized plasma turbulence

Abstract

The turbulence of collisionless magnetized plasmas, as observed in space, astrophysical, and magnetically confined fusion plasmas, has attracted considerable interest for a long-time. The entropy cascade in collisionless magnetized plasmas is a theoretically proposed dynamics comparable to the Kolmogorov energy cascade in fluid turbulence. Here, we present evidence of an entropy cascade in laboratory plasmas by direct visualization of the entropy distribution in the phase space of turbulence in laboratory experiments. This measurement confirms the scaling laws predicted by the gyrokinetic theory with the dual self-similarity hypothesis, which reflects the interplay between the position and velocity of ions by perpendicular nonlinear phase mixing. This verification contributes to our understanding of turbulent heating in the solar corona, accretion disks, and magnetically confined fusion plasmas.