Are Charged Particles Accelerated by the Solar Wind Termination Shock?

Details Are Charged Particles Accelerated by the Solar Wind Termination Shock? Are Charged Particles Accelerated by the Solar Wind Termination Shock?

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmsh13c..03g&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SH13C-03

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2104 Cosmic Rays, 2114 Energetic Particles (7514), 2124 Heliopause And Solar Wind Termination, 2134 Interplanetary Magnetic Fields, 7807 Charged Particle Motion And Acceleration

Scientific paper

The termination shock of the solar wind has long been thought to be the source of anomalous cosmic rays arising from the acceleration of interstellar pickup ions by diffusive shock acceleration. This has been the standard paradigm since the 1970's. However, since the two Voyagers have now both crossed the shock, it is clear that this picture needs to be revisited. The primary challenge to the standard paradigm is that the ACR energy spectrum was seen to be "modulated" in the heliosheath, whereas the expectation was that it would be a power law with a spectral index that depends on the jump in plasma density across the shock. Another challenge to the paradigm is the observation of highly anisotropic particle beams prior to the shock crossings. This suggests that the scattering mean-free path of these particles is very large making acceleration at the shock problematic. New ideas have emerged to explain the observations, including the recognition of the importance of the large-scale shape of the shock itself (blunt as opposed to spherical), and the effect of large-scale turbulence on the physics of shock acceleration. These will be discussed in this talk. The new observations also provide valuable information about the acceleration of low-energy ions and the injection process itself. I will present results from new simulations that show that the termination shock is a rapid and efficient accelerator of suprathermal pickup ions and the simulations results agree well with the low-energy part of the ACR spectrum (up to about 100 keV).

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