SHINE: Self-Consistent Resonant-Cyclotron Heating of Protons and Alpha Particles in the Solar Wind and Solar Corona

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

Abstract

This 3-year SHINE project is expected to yield new, more detailed kinetic models of the heating of charged particles (protons and alpha particles) in turbulently-driven collisionless plasmas, such as the solar corona and the solar wind. By utilizing a new computational technique, these studies will determine the self-consistent behavior of waves and particles in the presence of solar wind concentrations of alpha particles. The research agenda of this project directly addresses the SHINE goal of "understanding or characterizing the background solar wind and how it evolves." The project will be carried out within the excellent educational environment in space physics at the University of New Hampshire, which allows the PI and Co-I to continue their productive research interactions with graduate and undergraduate students there. The research and EPO agenda of this SHINE project supports the Strategic Goals of the AGS Division in discovery, learning, diversity, and interdisciplinary research. The main goal of this 3-year SHINE project is to investigate the self-consistent cyclotron-resonant wave-particle interaction resulting from continual heating of protons and alpha particles by Ion-Cyclotron Waves (ICW) dissipation. Using homogeneous 1.5D and 2.5D hybrid simulations, the project team will drive the ICW spectrum with a new technique that allows the wave properties to evolve self-consistently, without imposing particular wave modes. In this way, the team will determine the self-consistent wave properties responsible for shaping the proton and alpha-particle distributions in a collisionless plasma. The researchers will explore this self-consistent wave dispersion as a function of plasma beta and alpha streaming speed, to obtain results appropriate for the in-situ solar wind and for solar coronal holes. They will then incorporate this new information into their kinetic-guiding-center equations to compute the wave and particle evolution in the inhomogeneous expanding solar wind. The results from this project will be compared with in-situ solar wind measurements, and they will yield predictions for the ion distributions to be measured near the Sun by the future Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus missions.