Correlations and Energy Cascades in Magnetized Turbulence

Many terrestrial and astrophysical plasmas encompass very large dynamical ranges in space and time, which are not accessible by direct numerical simulations. Thus, idealized sub-volumes are often used to study small-scale effects including the dynamics of magnetized turbulence. One significant aspect of the dynamics of the turbulent cascade is the transfer of energy from the large to small scales. In this work, we present a new shell-to-shell energy transfer analysis framework for understanding cascades of energy within compressible magnetized turbulence. We demonstrate the viability of this framework through application to a series of isothermal subsonic and supersonic magnetized turbulence simulations and utilize results from this analysis to establish benchmarks in the non-linear regime for cross-code comparison. We further utilize these simulations to study how the autocorrelation time and normalization of the large-scale driving systematically change properties of the turbulence. In general, we show that shorter autocorrelation times require more power in the acceleration field. More power in the acceleration field results in more power in compressive modes that weaken the anti-correlation between density and magnetic field strength. We examine how these results can impact a range of diagnostics relevant for a range of terrestrial and astrophysical applications.