Coburn, Jesse T;
Verscharen, Daniel;
Owen, Christopher J;
Maksimovic, Milan;
Horbury, Timothy S;
Chen, Christopher HK;
Guo, Fan;
... Jagarlamudi, Vamsee Krishna; + view all
(2024)
The Regulation of the Solar Wind Electron Heat Flux by Wave–Particle Interactions.
The Astrophysical Journal
, 964
(1)
, Article 100. 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1329.
Preview |
PDF
Coburn_2024_ApJ_964_100.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
The solar wind electrons carry a significant heat flux into the heliosphere. The weakly collisional state of the solar wind implicates collisionless processes as the primary factor that constrains nonthermal features of the velocity distribution function (VDF), including the heat flux. Previous observational work suggests that the electron VDF sometimes becomes unstable to the whistler wave, but reliance on model VDFs (e.g., drifting bi-Maxwellians) has proven insufficient for an exact description of the behavior of the solar wind electrons—in particular, the regulation of the heat flux. The characterization of these processes requires methods to obtain fine details of the VDF and quantification of the impact of kinetic processes on the VDF. We employ measurements of the electron VDF by Solar Orbiter's Solar Wind Analyser and of the magnetic field by the Radio and Plasma Waves instrument to study an unstable solar wind electron configuration. Through a Hermite–Laguerre expansion of the VDF, we implement a low-pass filter in velocity space to remove velocity space noise and obtain a VDF suitable for analysis. With our method, we directly measure the instability growth rate and the rate of change of the electron heat flux through wave–particle interactions.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Regulation of the Solar Wind Electron Heat Flux by Wave–Particle Interactions |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1329 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1329 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10189839 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
