Plasma heating via parametric beating of Alfvén waves, with heliospheric applications

Details Plasma heating via parametric beating of Alfvén waves, with heliospheric applications Plasma heating via parametric beating of Alfvén waves, with heliospheric applications

May 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusmsh21a..10b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #SH21A-10

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Applications

0654 Plasmas, 2149 Mhd Waves And Turbulence, 2164 Solar Wind Plasma, 7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory, 7839 Nonlinear Phenomena

Scientific paper

This work advances a novel mechanism to explain the dissipation of the Alfvén waves that carry much of the energy in heliospheric and astrophysical turbulence, with specific applications to solar wind heating. The essential point is that the non-linear beating of relatively low-frequency Alfvén waves, which are abundant in the solar wind, drives a compressible magnetosonic response whose damping can dissipate significant energy. This mechanism involves both kinetic and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) processes. The damping of the magnetosonic waves is a kinetic process. The non-linear beating of Alfvén waves, which produces the magnetosonic waves, is most easily described by MHD theory. Near the Sun where significant unexplained heating occurs, this mechanism may dominate the more traditionally treated heating due to the cascade of turbulent energy to small-scale, high-frequency Alfvén waves that are dissipated by ion-cyclotron damping. The MHD analysis in this paper reveals that the fast magnetosonic mode dominates the dissipation when the plasma beta is near unity, and that the timescale of dissipation in the heliosphere can vary from hours to a year depending upon the direction of the driven wave and the plasma parameters where it is driven. A more detailed kinetic approach to understanding the same phenomenon yields similar results for a broad range of regimes, where the plasma density differs. The damping of the driven magnetosonic waves also helps to explain the observed high-energy particle distributions almost always observed in the slow solar wind.

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