Drift waves in the corona: heating and acceleration of ions at frequencies far below the gyro frequency

Abstract

In the solar corona, several mechanisms of the drift wave instability can make the mode growing up to amplitudes at which particle acceleration and stochastic heating by the drift wave take place. The stochastic heating, well known from laboratory plasma physics where it has been confirmed in numerous experiments, has been completely ignored in past studies of coronal heating. However, in the present study and in our very recent works it has been shown that the inhomogeneous coronal plasma is, in fact, a perfect environment for fast growing drift waves. As a matter of fact, the large growth rates are typically of the same order as the plasma frequency. The consequent heating rates may exceed the required values for a sustained coronal heating by several orders of magnitude. Some aspects of these phenomena are investigated here. In particular the analysis of the particle dynamics within the growing wave is compared with the corresponding fluid analysis. While both of them predict the stochastic heating, the threshold for the heating obtained from the single particle analysis is higher. The explanation for this effect is given.

To appear in MNRAS (2010)

References in corpus (8)

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• Quasi-adiabatic and stochastic heating and particle acceleration at quasi-perpendicular shocks
• New features of ion acoustic waves in inhomogeneous and permeating plasmas
• Local acceleration of protons to 100 keV in a quasi-parallel bow shock
• Thresholdless stochastic particle heating by a single wave
• 3-D exact analytical solutions of two fluid plasma, MHD and neutral fluid equations for the creation of ordered structures as well as jet-like flows
• Energy in density gradient