Damping of Electron Density Structures and Implications for Interstellar
  Scintillation
  The forms of electron density structures in kinetic Alfven wave turbulence
are studied in connection with scintillation. The focus is on small scales $L
\sim 10^8-10^{10}$ cm where the Kinetic Alfv\'en wave (KAW) regime is active in
the interstellar medium. MHD turbulence converts to a KAW cascade, starting at
10 times the ion gyroradius and continuing to smaller scales. These scales are
inferred to dominate scintillation in the theory of Boldyrev et al. From
numerical solutions of a decaying kinetic Alfv\'en wave turbulence model,
structure morphology reveals two types of localized structures, filaments and
sheets, and shows that they arise in different regimes of resistive and
diffusive damping. Minimal resistive damping yields localized current filaments
that form out of Gaussian-distributed initial conditions. When resistive
damping is large relative to diffusive damping, sheet-like structures form. In
the filamentary regime, each filament is associated with a non-localized
magnetic and density structure, circularly symmetric in cross section. Density
and magnetic fields have Gaussian statistics (as inferred from Gaussian-valued
kurtosis) while density gradients are strongly non-Gaussian, more so than
current. This enhancement of non-Gaussian statistics in a derivative field is
expected since gradient operations enhance small-scale fluctuations. The
enhancement of density gradient kurtosis over current kurtosis is not obvious,
yet it suggests that modest fluctuation levels in electron density may yield
large scintillation events during pulsar signal propagation in the interstellar
medium. In the sheet regime the same statistical observations hold, despite the
absence of localized filamentary structures. Probability density functions are
constructed from statistical ensembles in both regimes, showing clear formation
of long, highly non-Gaussian tails.
