Half a Century of Kinetic Solar Wind Models

Abstract

I outline the development of four generations of kinetic models, starting with Chamberlain's solar breeze exospheric model. It is shown why this first kinetic model did not give apposite supersonic evaporation velocities, like early hydrodynamic models of the solar wind. When a self-consistent polarization electric potential distribution is used in the coronal plasma, instead of the Pannekoek-Rosseland's one, supersonic bulk velocities are readily obtained in the second generation of kinetic models. It is outlined how the third and fourth generations of these models have improved the agreement with observations of slow and fast speed solar wind streams.

10 pages, 3 figures, presented at SW12 conf. ; Copyright (2010 AIP 978-0-7354-0759-6/10) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics The following article appeared in (CP1216) and may be found at (http://proceedings.aip.org)

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Non-Equilibrium Processes in the Solar Corona, Transition Region, Flares, and Solar Wind \textit{(Invited Review)}
• Polarization and stratification of axionically active plasma in a dyon magnetosphere