Toward a self-consistent treatment of the cyclotron wave heating and acceleration of the solar wind plasma
T. Laitinen, H. Fichtner, R. Vainio
We have developed a steady state two-fluid description of the radial solar wind expansion close to the coronal base. The model is formulated self-consistently with respect to the radial evolution of turbulence by supplementing the moment equations of the plasma with an equation describing the radial evolution of the Alfv\'en wave power as originally suggested by [1984]. We assume that there is sufficient wave power in the ion-cyclotron frequency range and determine the resulting acceleration and heating rates of the thermal plasma in the corona and interplanetary space. In improvement of earlier models of the nonlocal dynamics of the expanding corona, the dissipation frequency is determined self-consistently from the ion-cyclotron damping rate. After demonstrating that the time-independent modeling can correctly reproduce the solutions obtained with (in the above sense) non-self-consistent models, the significance of the self-consistent treatment is pointed out. The new solutions are studied in detail, and their implications for the transport of solar energetic particles are discussed.
Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics), 108, 1081, 2003