Authors: Mel Abler (Space Science Institute & UCLA), Seth Dorfman (Space Science Institute), Chistopher HK Chen (Queen Mary University of London)

Imbalanced plasma turbulence (turbulence with a much higher flux of waves in one direction than another) is a fundamental process which occurs throughout the universe, including many regions of the solar wind. The ubiquity of imbalanced plasma turbulence makes understanding the underlying nonlinear interactions critical to our understanding of energy transport across scales throughout the heliosphere. We compare laboratory measurements of a novel Hall-driven interaction between co-propagating Alfvén waves [1] to theoretical predictions; we then further compare these measurements to prior measurements of the standard MHD counter-propagating interaction and a Hall-driven wave steepening process to study the relative importance of each process for energy transfer at ion scales in a highly imbalanced regime.

[1] Mallet, Alfred, et al. “Nonlinear dynamics of small-scale Alfvén waves.” Physics of Plasmas 30.11 (2023).

Supported by NSF SHINE grant 2401219.