Modeling hot, anisotropic ion beams in the solar wind motivated by the Parker Solar Probe observations near perihelia

Abstract

Recent observations of the solar wind ions by the SPAN-I instruments on board the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) spacecraft at solar perihelia (Encounters) 4 and closer find ample evidence of complex anisotropic non-Maxwellian velocity distributions that consist of core, beam, and `hammerhead' (i.e., anisotropic beam) populations. The proton core populations are anisotropic, with T_perp/T||>1, and the beams have super-Alfvenic speed relative to the core (we provide an example from Encounter 17). The alpha-particle population show similar features as the protons. These unstable VDFs are associated with enhanced, right-hand (RH) and left-hand (LH) polarized ion-scale kinetic wave activity, detected by the FIELDS instrument. Motivated by PSP observations, we employ nonlinear hybrid models to investigate the evolution of the anisotropic hot-beam VDFs and model the growth and the nonlinear stage of ion kinetic instabilities in several linearly unstable cases. The models are initialized with ion VDFs motivated by the observational parameters. We find rapidly growing (in terms of proton gyroperiods) combined ion-cyclotron (IC) and magnetosonic (MS) instabilities, which produce LH and RH ion-scale wave spectra, respectively. The modeled ion VDFs in the nonlinear stage of the evolution are qualitatively in agreement with PSP observations of the anisotropic core and `hammerhead' velocity distributions, quantifying the effect of the ion kinetic instabilities on wind plasma heating close to the Sun. We conclude that the wave-particle interactions play an important role in the energy transfer between the magnetic energy (waves) and random particle motion leading to anisotropic solar wind plasma heating.

Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Evolution of an Alfvén Wave-Driven Proton Beam in the Expanding Solar Wind