Related papers: A transonic collisionless model of the solar wind
One of the basic properties of the solar wind, that is the high speed of the fast wind, is still not satisfactorily explained. This is mainly due to the theoretical difficulty of treating weakly collisional plasmas. The fluid approach…
Kinetic exospheric models revealed that the solar wind is accelerated by an ambipolar electric field up to supersonic velocities. The presence of suprathermal Strahl electrons at the exobase can further increase the velocity to higher…
There have been several ideas proposed to explain how the Sun's corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated. Some models assume that open magnetic field lines are heated by Alfven waves driven by photospheric motions and…
Parker Solar Probe (PSP) observations have revealed that most of the solar wind acceleration occurs very close to the Sun. This acceleration is partly due to the global electric potential originating from the mass disparity between…
How the solar wind is accelerated to its supersonic speed is intimately related to how it is heated. Mechanisms based on ion-cyclotron resonance have been successful in explaining a large number of observations, those concerning the…
This paper reviews the current state of our understanding of high-speed solar wind acceleration in coronal holes. Observations by SOHO, coupled with interplanetary particle measurements going back several decades, have put strong…
In this paper we discuss the collisionless transport equations, continuity, momentum and energy conservation, derived from a kinetic exospheric model of the solar wind based on a kappa velocity distribution function of the electrons. The…
The physical processes in the solar corona that shape the solar wind remain an active research topic. Modeling efforts have shown that energy and plasma exchanges near the transition region plays a crucial role in modulating solar wind…
The high-speed solar wind is typically the simplest and least stochastic type of large-scale plasma flow in the heliosphere. For much of the solar cycle, it is connected magnetically to large polar coronal holes on the Sun's surface.…
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…
Protons in the solar corona and heliosphere exhibit anisotropic velocity distributions, violation of magnetic moment conservation, and a general lack of thermal equilibrium with the other particle species. There is no agreement about the…
In the parts of the solar corona and solar wind that experience the fewest Coulomb collisions, the component proton, electron, and heavy ion populations are not in thermal equilibrium with one another. Observed differences in temperatures,…
The origins of the hot solar corona and the supersonically expanding solar wind are still the subject of much debate. This paper summarizes some of the essential ingredients of realistic and self-consistent models of solar wind…
We propose a new model for explaining the observations of more than mass proportional heating of heavy ions in the polar solar corona. We point out that a large number of small scale intermittent shock waves can be present in the solar…
We develop a three-dimensional kinetic model of the solar transition region and corona in which the plasma above the chromosphere is collisionless and embedded in a uniform magnetic field. Heating occurs intermittently at discrete locations…
Weakly collisional plasmas are subject to nonlinear relaxation processes, which can operate at rates much faster than the particle collision frequencies. This causes the plasma to respond like a magnetised fluid despite having long particle…
I outline the development of four generations of kinetic models, starting with Chamberlain's solar breeze exospheric model. It is shown why this first kinetic model did not give apposite supersonic evaporation velocities, like early…
The role of interchange reconnection as a drive mechanism for the solar wind is explored by solving the global magnetic-field-aligned equations describing wind acceleration. Boundary conditions in the low corona, including a…
The anticorrelated distributions of temperature and density of protons are a well-known property of the solar wind. Nevertheless, it is unclear till now if they are formed by some kind of the universal physical mechanism? Unfortunately, a…
The solar corona is a complex system, with nonisothermal plasma and being in the self-gravitating field of the Sun. So the corona plasma is not only a nonequilibrium system but also a nonextensive one. We estimate the parameter of…