A fluid description for Landau damping of dispersive MHD waves

Abstract. The dynamics of long oblique MHD waves in a collisionless plasma permeated by a uniform magnetic field is addressed using a Landau-fluid model that includes Hall effect and electron-pressure gradient in a generalized Ohm's law and retains ion finite Larmor radius (FLR) corrections to the gyrotropic pressure (Phys. Plasmas 10, 3906, 2003). This one-fluid model, built to reproduce the weakly nonlinear dynamics of long dispersive Alfvén waves propagating along an ambient field, is shown to correctly capture the Landau damping of oblique magnetosonic waves predicted by a kinetic theory based on the Vlasov-Maxwell system. For oblique and kinetic Alfvén waves (for which second order FLR corrections are to be retained), the linear character of waves with small but finite amplitudes is established, and the dispersion relation reproduced in the regime of adiabatic protons and isothermal electrons, associated with the condition m_e/m_p << β << T_e/T_p, where β is the squared ratio of the ion-acoustic to the Alfvén speeds. It is shown that in more general regimes, the heat fluxes are, to leading order, not gyrotropic and dependent on the Hall effect to leading order.