Simulation of asymmetric solar wind electron distributions
- Department of Physics, POSTECH, Pohang (Korea, Republic of)
- Massachusetts Technological Laboratory, Inc., 330 Pleasant Street, Belmont, Massachusetts 02478 (United States)
- Instituto de Fisica, UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
- Instituto de Fisica e Matematica, UFPel, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 (United States)
The electron distributions detected in the solar wind feature varying degrees of anisotropic high-energy tail. In a recent work the present authors numerically solved the one-dimensional electrostatic weak turbulence equations by assuming that the solar wind electrons are initially composed of thermal core plus field-aligned counterstreaming beams, and demonstrated that a wide variety of asymmetric energetic tail distribution may result. In the present paper, the essential findings in this work are tested by means of full particle-in-cell simulation technique. It is found that the previous results are largely confirmed, thus providing evidence that the paradigm of local electron acceleration to high-energy tail by self-consistently excited Langmuir turbulence may be relevant to the solar wind environment under certain circumstances. However, some discrepancies are found such that the nearly one-sided energetic tail reported in the numerical solution of the weak turbulence kinetic equation is not shown.
- OSTI ID:
- 21277242
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 16, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.3085795; (c) 2009 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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