Acceleration of the Weakly Collisional Solar Wind

Details Acceleration of the Weakly Collisional Solar Wind Acceleration of the Weakly Collisional Solar Wind

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufmsh31a1152z&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #SH31A-1152

Physics

Plasma Physics

7509 Corona, 7800 Space Plasma Physics, 7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory, 7843 Numerical Simulation Studies, 2164 Solar Wind Plasma

Scientific paper

A major assumption inherent to the usual fluid solar wind models is that the plasma is dominated by collisions. Therefore the fluid approach implies that the particle velocity distribution functions are close to Maxwellians. However the observed solar wind electron distributions depart significantly from Maxwellians, indicating the limited validity of this hypothesis. Collisionless models are not fully justified either, but should bring some insights into the physics since heat transport is mainly driven by suprathermal particles which are virtually collisionless because of the rapid increase with energy of the Coulomb free path. A proper theory should take into account the transition from a fully collisional regime to a weakly collisional one. If we neglect interactions with waves, the existence of a transonic plasma wind depends mainly on the electrostatic field and the heat flux which are determined by the velocity distributions of particles. In this work we present recent developments of a kinetic collisionless model of the solar wind and compare them with results obtained by numerical simulations that include collisions. Two important results emerge: a suprathermal tail in the electron velocity ditribution function enables to explain the fast wind and both models give the same speeds over a large range of parameters.

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