The dissipation mechanisms in weakly collisional turbulent plasmas have been a longstanding topic of investigation. In recent years, one significant and promising development has been the use of the “scale-filtered” Vlasov-Maxwell equations to fully quantify the scale-by-scale energy balance, a feature that was absent when using fluid models for kinetic plasmas. In particular, this method reveals that the energy transfer in kinetic scales is fully accounted for by the scale-filtered pressure-strain interaction. Despite contemporary progress, the influence of electron-ion thermal disequilibrium on the kinetic-scale energy budget remains poorly understood. Using two-dimensional fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of decaying plasma turbulence, we systematically investigate the scale-filtered pressure-strain interaction and its components at sub-ion scales by varying the electron-ion temperature ratio. Our analysis focuses on the three components of the pressure-strain interaction: the normal and shear components of total deformation $Pi-D$, and pressure dilatation. Our results demonstrate that the scale-filtered pressure-strain interaction is dominated by scale-filtered $Pi-D$ across the kinetic range, with the shear component consistently providing the dominant contribution. We find that the scale-filtered normal and shear contributions of $Pi-D$ exhibit persistent anticorrelation and opposite signs across all kinetic scales. We also discover that the amplitude of both anisotropic components, i.e., $Pi-D$ for each species, scales directly with their temperature and inversely with the temperature of the other species, whereas the scale-filtered pressure dilatation remains negligible compared to the $Pi-D$ terms but shows enhanced compressibility effects as plasma temperatures decrease. We discuss the implications of these findings in thermally nonequilibrated plasmas, such as in the turbulent magnetosheath and solar wind, and find that pressure-strain interaction could explain the scale-by-scale energy cascade rate in the solar wind at 1 AU.

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• Plasma turbulence
• Solar plasma
• Particle-in-cell methods
• Plasma kinetic theory