Wave generation and heat flux suppression in astrophysical plasma systems

Thermal conduction in weakly collisional, weakly magnetized plasmas such as the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters and the solar wind is not fully understood. One possibility is that electron-scale turbulence can inhibit thermal fluxes through scattering. In our particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation model two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures drive an electron heat flux that destabilizes oblique whistler waves. The whistlers grow to large amplitude and resonantly scatter the electrons, strongly suppressing the heat flux. Unlike classical conduction the steady state heat flux is largely insensitive to the imposed temperature gradient. The derived scaling law for thermal conduction has been confirmed in solar wind measurements by Tong et al. (arXiv 2018). We have extended our results to lower beta, which is more relevant for the solar wind and corona. In this regime whistlers gradually become subdominant and the heat flux is mostly regulated by electrostatic double layers, which modify the thermal conduction scaling.