Turbulence and Heating in Collisionless Astrophysical Plasmas

Astrophysical plasmas are generally collisionless, meaning that they are always far from local thermodynamic equilibrium, allowing different species, such as protons and electrons, to have distinct temperatures. What's more, in most contexts, these plasmas are turbulent: the energy injected on a large scale cascades in a non-linear fashion and is ultimately dissipated by kinetic processes that can heat up the plasma. Understanding the interaction between turbulence and heating, and how turbulent energy is partitioned and distributed between protons and electrons, is one of the main challenges in this field. In this thesis, we address this problem by using a novel approach to measure cascade and heating rates in data from NASA's MMS space mission.