Authors: Subash Adhikari (Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA), Paul A. Cassak (Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA), M. Hasan Barbhuiya (Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA), Tulasi. N. Parashar (School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6012, New Zealand), Michael A. Shay (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA)
Recently, energy conversion associated with all moments of the phase space density beyond temperature has been found to be locally significant for collisionless plasmas (Cassak et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 130, 085201, 2023). It is quantified via the so-called relative entropy. However, a detailed investigation of this energy conversion channel in magnetized turbulence has yet to be performed. In this study, we investigate the properties of this energy conversion channel in kinetic plasma turbulence using particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of the Orszag-Tang Vortex (OTV) in computational systems of varying domain sizes from electron- to ion-scales. We examine the conversion of energy between work, internal energy, and heat using the pressure-strain interaction and relative entropy as diagnostics. A detailed scaling analysis is performed for these quantities. Finally, the effect of a guide field on the overall behavior of energy conversion is explored.