Anomalous scaling and the role of intermittency in solar wind MHD turbulence: new insights

In the Alfvenic regime, i.e. for frequencies below the local proton cyclotron frequency, solar wind MHD turbulence exhibits what appears like an inertial domain, with power-law spectra and scale-invariance, suggesting as in fluid turbulence, a nonlinear energy cascade from the large "energy containing" scales towards much smaller scales, where dissipation via kinetic effects is presumed to act. However, the intermittent character of the solar wind fluctuations in the inertial range is much more important than in ordinary fluids. Indeed, the fluctuations consist of a mixture of random fluctuations and small-scale "singular" or coherent structures. This intermittency modifies significantly the scaling exponents of actual power-law spectra, which are directly related to the physical nature of the energy cascade taking place in the solar wind. The identification of the most intermittent structures and their relation to dissipation represents then a crucial problem in the framework of turbulence. We will discuss here recent results on scaling laws and intermittency based on the use of Wavelet transforms on simultaneous WIND 3s resolution particle and magnetic field data from the 3DP and the MFi experiments respectively. More specifically, the Haar Wavelet transform is used to compute spectra, structure functions and probability distribution functions (PDFs). We show that this powerful technique allows: (1) for a systematic study of intermittency effects on these spectra, structure functions and PDFs, thus for a clear determination of the actual scaling properties in the inertial range, and (2) for a direct and systematic identification of the most active, singular structures responsible for the intermittency in the solar wind. The analysis of structure functions and PDFs and new results on the nature of the intermittent coherent structures will be presented.