Supersonic vortices - understanding the building blocks of supersonic, sub-Alfvenic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

Strongly magnetised, compressible turbulence is ubiquitous in the solar wind, atmosphere of compact objects, and even cold molecular and atomic gas distributed across the Galaxy. Beattie, et al. (2020b,2022a,2022c) has shown that in this regime of turbulence the energy budget is dominated not by turbulent nor Alfvenic fluctuations, as previously assumed, but rather rigid body vortices that are self-organised into a quasi-stationary state that give rise to non-classical dissipation, non-local intermittency effects, and peculiar decay characteristics that are currently not captured by any turbulence phenomenology. By utilising both computational and analytical techniques, in this project, we aim to (1) build a vortex tracking code to use on high-resolution, three-dimensional turbulence data, so that we can extract and characterise the local dynamics that give rise to, maintain, and eventually decay these vortices; and (2) explore the stability and signature of these vortices in linear eigenmode decompositions of the turbulent plasma. These results will have fundamental repercussions for not only strongly magnetised compressible turbulence theory (e.g., residual energy theory), but also for GeV cosmic ray transport, and the measurement of interstellar magnetic fields using Davis-Chandreshkar-Fermi methods.