CCA Seminar – Blakesley Burkhart Talk

New Diagnostics of MHD Turbulence in the Multiphase Interstellar Medium

Our current view of the interstellar medium (ISM) is as a multiphase environment where turbulence affects many key processes. These include star formation, cosmic ray acceleration, and the evolution of structure in the diffuse ISM. In this talk, I shall discuss progress in the development of new techniques for comparing observational data with MHD simulations. Many of these statistics have been applied in other fields (e.g. cosmology, solar wind) and are non-Gaussian indicators or are sensitive to topological information. I will demonstrate the application of the bispectrum, genus, and the velocity anisotropy technique for turbulence studies. These diagnostics, recently applied to large ISM data sets, have already provided substantial leaps in our understanding of turbulence in the warm neutral medium (21-cm line observations) and the warm ionized gas as traced by synchrotron polarization. Afterwords, I will invite CCA members to discuss the possibilities of application of novel statistical tools to big data sets in the context of the ISM and other to fields.