Identifying Coherent Events in Real and Simulated Solar Wind Turbulence

The solar wind is a turbulent plasma, exhibiting fluctuations at all observed scales. While turbulence is generally a statistical topic of study, there is also interest in individual structures in the solar wind plasma, such as MHD discontinuities or vortices. These structures, where the wave energy is sufficiently coherent to be long lived in the plasma as it transits from the Sun, have been identified in the solar wind. These are also of interest because of their contribution to the intermittency of the solar wind fluctuations, i.e. the presence of long tails in the distribution functions of fluctuation energy in space. In this thesis, the topic of these coherent structures and their corresponding intervals of data, intermittent events, is reviewed. We review the literature concerning detection techniques for these intermittent events as well as the interpretation for their presence in the data. We reproduce an algorithm used in the literature for detecting discontinuities (a type of intermittent event) and apply it to magnetic field data at 0.1 au and 1 au distances from the Sun corresponding to the same plasma parcel. Clearly identified discontinuities are rare at 0.1 au, indicating that the idea of a solar wind filled with discontinuities may be specific to more evolved 1 au wind. In a second project, an artificial time series is obtained from a particle-in-cell simulation and used to detect intermittent events using another technique, the Local Intermittency Measure. The intermittent intervals are then matched to their visible structure in the simulation. The identified intervals are found to correspond to visible structure in the simulation, mostly edges of vortices and other line shaped structures. It is also found that most detected structures are perpendicular to the artificial spacecraft trajectory, indicating a detection bias