Intermittency of Fast MHD Modes and Regions of Anomalous Gradient Orientation in Low-β Plasmas

Abstract

Abstract The strong alignment of small-scale turbulent Alfvénic motions with the direction of magnetic field that percolates the small-scale eddies and imprints the direction of the magnetic field is a property that follows from the MHD theory and the theory of turbulent reconnection. The Alfvénic eddies mix magnetic fields perpendicular to the direction of the local magnetic field, and this type of motion is used to trace magnetic fields with the velocity gradient technique (VGT). The other type of turbulent motion, fast modes, induces anisotropies orthogonal to Alfvénic eddies and interferes with the tracing of the magnetic field with the VGT. We report a new effect, i.e., in a magnetically dominated low-β subsonic medium, fast modes are very intermittent, and in a volume with a small filling factor the fast modes dominate other turbulent motions. We identify these localized regions as the cause of the occasional change of direction of gradients in our synthetic observations. We show that the new technique of measuring the gradients of gradient amplitudes suppresses the contribution from the fast-mode-dominated regions, improving the magnetic field tracing. In addition, we show that the distortion of the gradient measurements by fast modes is also applicable to the synchrotron intensity gradients, but the effect is reduced compared to the VGT.