HR: 0830h
AN: SH51A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Towards a Universal Physics-based "Coronal Heating Function" for Electrons, Protons, and Heavy Ions in the Accelerating Solar Wind
AU: * Cranmer, S R
EM: scranmer@cfa.harvard.edu
AF: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., MS 50, Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
AU: van Ballegooijen, A A
EM: avanballegooijen@cfa.harvard.edu
AF: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., MS 50, Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
AB: The Sun is often highlighted as a benchmark for the study of other stars, and as a stepping stone to the study of galaxies and cosmic distances. Not to be outdone, the solar wind is rapidly becoming a key baseline for the understanding of basic plasma phenomena such as MHD turbulence, kinetic wave-particle interactions, and nonlinear wave-mode coupling. In keeping with the IHY focus on these kinds of universal processes, we present a distillation of recent modeling efforts to understand how Alfven waves are generated, reflected, cascaded, and damped throughout the solar wind. A physical understanding of solar wind turbulence is crucial to the modeling of energetic particle transport in the heliosphere and the interaction with interstellar neutrals. The goal of this work is to derive a useful "recipe" for solar wind modelers that, given the background zero-order plasma properties, yields the wave amplitudes, the turbulent cascade rates, and the kinetic partitioning of the resultant heating into electrons, protons, and heavy ions (differentiating between parallel and perpendicular heating as well). We also discuss preliminary ideas concerning how the collisionless particle heating is modified if the turbulent cascade ends with the production of small-scale reconnection current sheets.
DE: 2149 MHD waves and turbulence
DE: 2164 Solar wind plasma
DE: 2169 Sources of the solar wind
DE: 7509 Corona
DE: 7867 Wave/particle interactions
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly