Kinetic Distributions of Coronal Hole Protons in the Solar Wind Generation Region

Details Kinetic Distributions of Coronal Hole Protons in the Solar Wind Generation Region Kinetic Distributions of Coronal Hole Protons in the Solar Wind Generation Region

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsh43d..04i&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SH43D-04

Physics

Plasma Physics

[2149] Interplanetary Physics / Mhd Waves And Turbulence, [2164] Interplanetary Physics / Solar Wind Plasma, [7511] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Coronal Holes, [7867] Space Plasma Physics / Wave/Particle Interactions

Scientific paper

We solve the inhomogeneous kinetic guiding-center equation for the collisionless proton distribution function in a model polar coronal hole. The protons react to the local forces due to gravity, charge separation electric field, focusing in the decreasing magnetic field, and ponderomotive wave pressure. They are also heated through resonant cyclotron diffusion by a broad spectrum of obliquely-propagating ion cyclotron waves. We model the resonant wave intensities by a power-law extrapolation from the Alfvén wave results of Cranmer and van Ballegooijen (2005), multiplied by an additional scaling factor to represent the inefficient turbulent transport to resonant frequencies. We find that a scaling factor as low as 0.01 gives sufficient proton heating to yield a fast solar wind. The resulting proton distributions have a distinctive shape, compressed in the sunward half of velocity space, and more spread out (that is, hotter) in the anti-sunward half. Observation of similarly-shaped distributions in the fast wind by instruments on Solar Probe would provide evidence for resonant cyclotron heating as the generation mechanism for the solar wind. We will present results for the radial evolution of the model proton distribution, as well as moment quantities such as flow speed, temperatures and heating rates.

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