New Hybrid Simulations of the Acceleration of Pickup Ions to High Energies at the Termination Shock

Details New Hybrid Simulations of the Acceleration of Pickup Ions to High Energies at the Termination Shock New Hybrid Simulations of the Acceleration of Pickup Ions to High Energies at the Termination Shock

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsh24a..06g&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SH24A-06

Physics

Plasma Physics

[2114] Interplanetary Physics / Energetic Particles, [2152] Interplanetary Physics / Pickup Ions, [7845] Space Plasma Physics / Particle Acceleration, [7851] Space Plasma Physics / Shock Waves

Scientific paper

We present results from new numerical simulations of the interaction of interstellar pickup ions with the solar wind termination shock, and discuss their implications for interpreting Voyager 2 observations (energetic particles, magnetic field, and plasma). Our simulations consider multiple ion species, including solar-wind protons, interstellar pickup hydrogen and oxygen, and pre-existing suprathermal protons. The ions are modeled kinetically and the electrons as a massless fluid. Pre-existing large-scale magnetic fluctuations, which are known to exist in the solar wind and have important effects on the acceleration of particles by shocks, are also included. Our simulations have large enough spatial and temporal scales to accurately describe the acceleration of ions up to about ~70 keV (the new simulations are about 20 times larger than that considered in a paper we recently published). Our simulated ion energy spectra overlap the lowest-energy part of the observed spectrum from the LECP instrument on Voyager 2 in the region just behind the termination shock. We show that these are ``core'' pickup protons that have been accelerated directly by the termination shock. The fact that we find significant acceleration of low-energy ions for a shock whose normal is perpendicular to the average magnetic field indicates that there is not an injection problem, as has been suggested by some previous studies.

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