Scaling laws and intermittent structures in solar wind MHD turbulence

Abstract

Thirteen months of velocity and magnetic field data from ISEE space experiment have been used to calculate spectra and structure functions using Haar wavelets technique in the range from 1 minute to about 1 day. Using conditioned structure function definition we have been able to eliminate the intermittency effects in the spectra and thus to evidentiate which kind of phenomenology of nonlinear cascade between Kolmogorov and Kraichnan is taking place in Solar Wind turbulence. By the same technique the most intermittent structures in solar wind turbulence can also be identified and they turn out to be either shock waves or one dimensional current sheets, at variance with ordinary fluid intermittency, where the most intermittent structures are two dimensional vortices.