Diffusion of charged particles in a stochastic force-free magnetic field
Abstract
We study diffusion of charged particles in stationary stochastic magnetic field with zero mean, . In the case when electric current is carried by electrons, the field is force-free, , where is an arbitrary scalar function. In a small region where the function and the field magnitude are approximately constant, the equations of motion of charged particles are integrated and reduced to the equation of mathematical pendulum. The transition from trapped to untrapped particles is continuously traced. Averaging over the magnetic field spectrum gives the spatial diffusion coefficient of particles as a function of the Larmor radius in the large-scale magnetic fields () and magnetic field correlation length . The diffusion coefficient turns out to be proportional to the Larmor radius, , for , and to the Larmor radius squared, , for . We apply obtained results to the diffusion of cosmic rays in the Galaxy, which contains a large number of independent regions with parameters and varying in wide range. We average over with the Kolmogorov spectrum and over with the distribution function . For the practically flat spectrum , we have , which is consistent with observations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1612.02331,
title = {Diffusion of charged particles in a stochastic force-free magnetic field},
author = {Ya. N. Istomin and A. M. Kiselev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.02331},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
10 pages, 5 figures