Explosive instability, quiet plasma: phase-space cascades, coherent vortices, and transport suppression in a dipole pair plasma

Turbulence in a magnetised dipole pair plasma can transfer electrostatic energy into coherent flows while carrying entropy to small scales. This occurs via a dual cascade in a four-dimensional phase space, whereby advection by the fluctuating electric field nonlinearly phase-mixes the transit-averaged particle motion. Below a critical pressure gradient, zonal bands suppress the kinetic mode, leaving a transport floor. When the fluid mode is unstable, an explosive burst collapses into a zonal condensate on which two vortices "breathe" by reversible energy exchange, without causing net transport.