The whistler heat flux instability: Threshold conditions in the solar wind

Details The whistler heat flux instability: Threshold conditions in the solar wind The whistler heat flux instability: Threshold conditions in the solar wind

Dec 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994jgr....9923391g&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research (ISSN 0148-0227), vol. 99, no. A12, p. 23,391-23,399

Physics

Plasma Physics

33

Anisotropic Media, Electrons, Heat Flux, Heliosphere, Magnetohydrodynamic Stability, Solar Wind, Wave-Particle Interactions, Whistlers, Closure Law, Electron Distribution, Mathematical Models, Plasma Physics, Ulysses Mission, Wave Dispersion

Scientific paper

Solar wind electrons are observed often to consist of two components: a core and a halo. The anisotropics and relative average speeds of these components correspond to a heat flux that has the potential to excite several different electromagetic instabilities; wave-particle scattering by the resulting enhanced fluctuations can limit this heat flux. This manuscript describes theoretical studies using the linear Vlasco dispersion equation for drifting bi-Maxwellian component distributions in a homogeneous plasma to examine the threshold of the whistler heat flux instability. Expressions for this threshold are obtained from two different parametric baselines: a local model that yields scalings as functions of local dimensionless plasma paramaters, and a global model based on average electron properties observed during the in-eliptic phase of the Ulysses mission. The latter model yields an expression for the heat flux at threshold of the whistler instability as a function of helisopheric radius that scales in the same way as the average heat flux observed form Ulysses and that provides an approximate upper bound for that same quantity. This theoretical scaling is combined with the observational results to yield a semi-empirical closure relation for the average electron heat flux in the solar wind between 1 and 5 AU.

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