HR: 1340h
AN: SH14A-1695    [Abstracts]
TI: The Effects of Using a Differential Cross-section for Charge-exchange on the Geometry of the Heliosphere
AU: * Heerikhuisen, J
EM: jacobh@ucr.edu
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, United States
AU: Kharchenko, V
EM: vkharchenko@cfa.harvard.edu
AF: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
AU: Zank, G P
EM: zank@ucr.edu
AF: Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, United States
AB: The flow of the solar wind plasma carves out the heliosphere, and creates a large scale region of interaction between itself and the interstellar medium. Although the solar wind and interstellar plasmas do not mix -- they are instead separated by a contact discontinuity known as the heliopause -- neutral hydrogen atoms of interstellar origin flow freely through the entire region. Charge-exchange weakly couples the plasma and neutral gasses, and this process leads to a significant cooling and shrinking of the heliosheath compared with a plasma-only model). Secondary neutral atoms produced in the solar wind by this process may travel back into the interstellar medium and deposit their energy upon further charge-exchange. Models of the heliosphere have traditionally included neutral hydrogen atoms either kinetically or as a fluid, and coupled these to the plasma through charge-exchange. Charge-exchange collisions, however, represent a limiting case of a more general H-p collision, where particle momentum interchange exactly. In this poster we compare this commonly used approximation with an approach which utilizes the differential cross-section. We will present a detailed analysis of the ion and neutral distributions, along with comparisons of the overall heliospheric structure in axially symmetric geometry.
DE: 2124 Heliopause and solar wind termination
DE: 2126 Heliosphere/interstellar medium interactions
DE: 2151 Neutral particles (7837)
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting