Related papers: Clarifying the solar wind heat-flux instabilities
Electron velocity distributions in the solar wind are known to have field-aligned skewness, which has been characterized by the presence of secondary populations such as the halo and strahl. Skewness may provide energy for the excitation of…
In collision-poor plasmas from space, e.g., solar wind, terrestrial magnetospheres, kinetic instabilities are expected to play a major role in constraining the temperature anisotropy of plasma particles, but a definitive answer can be given…
The hot beaming (or strahl) electrons responsible for the main electron heat-flux in the solar wind are believed to be self-regulated by the electromagnetic beaming instabilities, also known as the heat-flux instabilities. Here we report…
In space plasmas kinetic instabilities are driven by the beaming (drifting) components and/or the temperature anisotropy of charged particles. The heat-flux instabilities are known in the literature as electromagnetic modes destabilized by…
The indefinite increase of temperature predicted by the solar wind expansion in the direction parallel to the interplanetary magnetic field is already notorious for not being confirmed by the observations. In hot and dilute plasmas from…
In the absence of efficient collisions, deviations from thermal equilibrium of plasma particle distributions are controlled by the self-generated instabilities. The whistler instability is a notorious example, usually responsible for the…
In collision-poor plasmas from space, e.g., solar wind or stellar outflows, the heat-flux carried by the strahl or beaming electrons is expected to be regulated by the self-generated instabilities. Recently, simultaneous field and particle…
The electrons are an essential particle species in the solar wind. They often exhibit non-equilibrium features in their velocity distribution function. These include temperature anisotropies, tails (kurtosis), and reflectional asymmetries…
The heat transport in the solar wind is dominated by the suprathermal electron populations, i.e., a tenuous halo and a field-aligned beam/strahl, with high energies and antisunward drifts along the magnetic field. Their evolution may offer…
In the solar wind an equipartition of kinetic energy densities can be easily established between thermal and suprathermal electrons and the instability conditions are markedly altered by the interplay of these two populations. The new…
We present for the first time the joint distribution of electron heat flux and electron plasma beta, and the joint distribution of core electron drift velocity and electron plasma beta using a statistically large dataset of solar wind…
Spacecraft observations showed that electron heat conduction in the solar wind is probably regulated by whistler waves, whose origin and efficiency in electron heat flux suppression is actively investigated. In this paper, we present…
Temperature anisotropy and field-aligned skewness are commonly observed non-thermal features in electron velocity distributions in the solar wind. These characteristics can act as a source of free energy to destabilize different…
Important efforts are currently made for understanding the so-called kinetic instabilities, driven by the anisotropy of different species of plasma particles present in the solar wind and terrestrial magnetosphere. These instabilities are…
An electron distribution with a temperature anisotropy T_par/T_perp > 1 can lead to the Electron Firehose instability (Here par and perp denote directions relative to the background magnetic field B_0). Since possible particle acceleration…
Electron temperature anisotropies and electron beams are nonthermal features of the observed nonequilibrium electron velocity distributions in the solar wind. In collision-poor plasmas these nonequilibrium distributions are expected to be…
Depending on the physical conditions involved the beam plasma systems may reveal new unstable regimes triggered by the wave instabilities of different nature. We show through linear theory and numerical simulations the existence of an…
In this work, we analyze the kinetic stability of a solar wind electron distribution composed of core and strahl subpopulations. The core is modeled by a drifting Maxwellian distribution, while the strahl is modeled by an analytic function…
We present results of two-dimensional fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell simulation in order to shed light on the role of whistler waves in the scattering of strahl electrons and in the heat flux regulation in the solar wind. We model the…
Context. Solar outflows are a considerable source of free energy which accumulates in multiple forms like beaming (or drifting) components and/or temperature anisotropies. However, kinetic anisotropies of plasma particles do not grow…