Modeling space plasma dynamics with anisotropic Kappa distributions

Abstract

Space plasmas are collisionpoor and kinetic effects prevail leading to wave fluctuations, which transfer the energy to small scales: wave-particle interactions replace collisions and enhance dispersive effects heating particles and producing suprathermal populations observed at any heliospheric distance in the solar wind. At large distances collisions are not efficient, and the selfgenerated instabilities constrain the solar wind anisotropy including the thermal core and the suprathermal components. The generalized power-laws of Kappa-type are the best fitting model for the observed distributions of particles, and a convenient mathematical tool for modeling their dynamics. But the anisotropic Kappa models are not correlated with the observations leading, in general, to inconsistent effects. This review work aims to reconcile some of the existing Kappa models with the observations.

Paper accepted for publication in Astronomy and Space Science Proceedings - Springer (presented by M. Lazar at the International Astrophysics Forum 2011: Frontiers in Space Environment Research, at the Congress Centrum Alpbach (Austria) / June 20 - 24, 2011.)

References in corpus (3)

• Kappa distributions: theory and applications in space plasmas
• Magnetic fluctuation power near proton temperature anisotropy instability thresholds in the solar wind
• Is the Weibel instability enhanced by the suprathermal populations, or not?

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Moments of the anisotropic regularized $\kappa$-distributions
• On the applicability of $\kappa$-distributions
• Generalized anisotropic $\kappa$-cookbook: 2D fitting of Ulysses electron data
• Electron Heat Flux in the Solar Wind: Generalized Approaches to Fluid Transport with a Variety of Skewed Velocity Distributions
• Electromagnetic ion-cyclotron instability in a dusty plasma with product-bi-kappa distributions for the plasma particles