Speaker
Description
The study of the statistics of gradient tensors’ invariants is useful to characterize the morphological and topological features of magnetic flux and plasma streamlines in turbulent space plasmas. In the recent past some studies of the statistics of the gradient tensors’ invariants have been performed to investigate the velocity and magnetic field flow lines topologies in turbulent heliospheric plasmas, thanks to the availability of multipoint space missions. Here, we present a novel/complementary approach to the characterization of the gradient tensor properties of velocity and magnetic field in plasmas based on Schur’s decomposition of the field gradient tensors. This decomposition can be seen as alternative to the standard decomposition into symmetric and skew-symmetric components allowing for a decomposition of gradients into normal/local and non-normal/non-local contributions, separating eigenvalue and ideal pressure terms from the deviatoric pressure Hessian and dissipative ones. We show an application of this method to observations of real data from the NASA-MMS space mission in the solar wind and in the magnetosheath region.
