Related papers: An anisotropic-Alfvenic-turbulence-based solar win…
Although the mechanisms responsible for heating the Sun's corona and accelerating the solar wind are still being actively investigated, it is largely accepted that photospheric motions provide the energy source and that the magnetic field…
One proposed mechanism for heating the solar wind, from close to the sun to beyond 10 AU, invokes low-frequency, oblique, Alfven-wave turbulence. Because small-scale oblique Alfven waves (kinetic Alfven waves) are compressive, the measured…
Minor ions in the solar corona are heated to extreme temperatures, far in excess of those of the electrons and protons that comprise the bulk of the plasma. These highly non-thermal distributions make minor ions sensitive probes of the…
Using linear Vlasov theory of plasma waves and quasi-linear theory of resonant wave-particle interaction, the dispersion relations and the electromagnetic field fluctuations of fast and Alfven waves are studied for a low-beta multi-ion…
Circularly polarized, nearly parallel propagating waves are prevalent in the solar wind at ion-kinetic scales. At these scales, the spectrum of turbulent fluctuations in the solar wind steepens, often called the transition-range, before…
We study correlations of the temperature ratio (which is an indicator for perpendicular ion heating) and the differential flow of the alpha particles with the power of transverse fluctuations that have wave numbers between 0.01 and 0.1…
A semi-empirical, axisymmetric model of the solar minimum corona is developed by solving the equations for conservation of mass and momentum with prescribed anisotropic temperature distributions. In the high-latitude regions, the proton…
The solar corona has been revealed in the past decade to be a highly dynamic nonequilibrium plasma environment. Both the loop-filled coronal base and the extended acceleration region of the solar wind appear to be strongly turbulent, but…
A variety of nonthermal characteristics like kinetic, e.g., temperature, anisotropies and suprathermal populations (enhancing the high energy tails of the velocity distributions) are revealed by the in-situ observations in the solar wind…
We explore a mechanism, entirely new to the fast solar wind, of electron heating by lower hybrid waves to explain the shift to higher charge states observed in various elements in the fast wind at 1 A.U. relative to the original coronal…
The acceleration of the solar coronal plasma to supersonic speeds is one of the most fundamental yet unresolved problem in heliophysics. Despite the success of Parker's pioneering theory on an isothermal solar corona, the realistic solar…
We extend previous theories of stochastic ion heating to account for the motion of ions along the magnetic field. We derive an analytic expression for the ion-to-proton perpendicular temperature ratio in the solar wind for any ion species,…
We perform 2.5D hybrid simulations with massless fluid electrons and kinetic particle-in-cell ions to study the temporal evolution of ion temperatures, temperature anisotropies and velocity distribution functions in relation to the…
The heating and acceleration of the solar wind remains one of the fundamental unsolved problems in heliophysics. It is usually observed that the proton temperature $T_i$ is highly correlated with the solar wind speed $V_{SW}$, while the…
Using one-dimensional hybrid expanding box model we investigate properties of the solar wind in the outer heliosphere. We assume a proton-electron plasma with a strictly transverse ambient magnetic field and, beside the expansion, we take…
The origins of the hot solar corona and the supersonically expanding solar wind are still the subject of debate. A key obstacle in the way of producing realistic simulations of the Sun-heliosphere system is the lack of a physically…
We present numerical simulations of reduced magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD) turbulence in a magnetic flux tube at the center of a polar coronal hole. The model for the background atmosphere is a solution of the momentum equation, and includes…
We have performed a 2.5 dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation that resolves the propagation and dissipation of Alfven waves in the solar atmosphere. Alfvenic fluctuations are introduced on the bottom boundary of the extremely large…
Particle velocity distributions measured in the weakly collisional solar wind are frequently found to be non-Maxwellian, but how these non-Maxwellian distributions impact the physics of plasma turbulence in the solar wind remains…
The dissipation of magnetized turbulence is an important paradigm for describing heating and energy transfer in astrophysical environments such as the solar corona and wind; however, the specific collisionless processes behind dissipation…