Landau fluid closures with nonlinear large-scale finite Larmor radius corrections for collisionless plasmas

Abstract

With the aim to develop a tool for simulating turbulence in collisionless magnetized plasmas, fluid models retaining low-frequency kinetic effects such as Landau damping and finite Larmor radius (FLR) corrections are discussed. It turns out that, in the absence of ion-cyclotron resonance, the dispersion and damping of kinetic Alfvén waves at scales as small as a fraction of the ion Larmor radius are accurately reproduced when using fluid estimates of the non-gyrotropic moments, at leading-order within a large-scale asymptotics. Differently, evaluations based on the low-frequency linear kinetic theory are necessary in regimes of large temperature anisotropies, and in particular in the presence of the mirror instability. Combining both descriptions leads to a new Landau fluid model retaining large-scale FLR nonlinearities, while reproducing the linear dynamics of low-frequency modes at the sub-ionic scales.