Alternative high plasma beta regimes of electron heat-flux instabilities in the solar wind

Abstract

The heat transport in the solar wind is dominated by the suprathermal electron populations, i.e., a tenuous halo and a field-aligned beam/strahl, with high energies and antisunward drifts along the magnetic field. Their evolution may offer plausible explanations for the rapid decrease of the heat flux with the solar wind expansion, typically invoked being the self-generated instabilities, or the so-called heat flux instabilities (HFIs). The present paper provides a unified description of the full spectrum of HFIs, as prescribed by the linear kinetic theory for high beta conditions (${\beta }_e\gg 0.1$) and different relative drifts ($U$) of the suprathermals. HFIs of different nature are distinguished, i.e., electromagnetic, electrostatic or hybrid, propagating parallel or obliquely to the magnetic field, etc., as well as their regimes of interplay (co-existence) or dominance. These alternative regimes of HFIs complement each other and may be characteristic to different relative drifts of suprathermal electrons and various conditions in the solar wind, e.g., in the slow or fast winds, streaming interaction regions and interplanetary shocks. Moreover, these results strongly suggest that heat flux regulation may not involve only one but several HFIs, concomitantly or successively in time. Conditions for a single, well defined instability with major effects on the suprathermal electrons and, implicitly, the heat flux, seem to be very limited. Whistler HFIs are more likely to occur but only for minor drifts (as also reported by recent observations), which may explain a modest implication in their regulation, shown already in quasilinear studies and numerical simulations.

Submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (6)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• On the role of solar wind expansion as a source of whistler waves: scattering of suprathermal electrons and heat flux regulation in the inner heliosphere
• Parker Solar Probe evidence for scattering of electrons in the young solar wind by narrowband whistler-mode waves
• On the Relation between Kappa Distribution Functions and the Plasma Beta Parameter in the Earth Magnetosphere: THEMIS observations
• Towards a general quasi-linear approach for the instabilities of bi-Kappa plasmas. Whistler instability
• Stability of superthermal strahl electrons in the solar wind
• The Stability of the Electron Strahl against the Oblique Fast-magnetosonic/Whistler Instability in the Inner Heliosphere
• Electron Heat Flux in the Solar Wind: Generalized Approaches to Fluid Transport with a Variety of Skewed Velocity Distributions
• The Kinetic Expansion of Solar-Wind Electrons: Transport Theory and Predictions for the very Inner Heliosphere
• Effects of the Background Turbulence on the Relaxation of Ion Temperature Anisotropy in Space Plasmas
• Parker Solar Probe evidence for the absence of whistlers close to the Sun to scatter strahl and regulate heat flux