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Kaghashvili et al. 2004
Kaghashvili, E.K., Vasquez, B.J., Zank, G.P. and Hollweg, J.V. (2004). Deceleration of relative streaming between proton components among nonlinear low-frequency Alfvén waves. Journal of Geophysical Research 109: doi: 10.1029/2004JA010382. issn: 0148-0227.

Proton distributions in fast solar winds often have a beam component with a differential streaming speed near the local Alfv¿n speed. The Alfv¿n speed and differential streaming speed decrease with increasing distance from the Sun. Thus the beam decelerates, especially within 1 AU where ¿ (which is ratio of plasma to magnetic pressure) can be significantly smaller than unity. We present 2 1/2-dimensional hybrid numerical simulation results of the evolution of particle proton components streaming relative to each other for moderate relative beam densities (up to 50%) for initially isotropic distributions with mostly equal beam and main proton temperatures and small plasma ¿(=0.2). Electrons are treated as a fluid. We consider cases without and with initial nonlinear low-frequency (nearly dispersionless) shear Alfv¿n waves propagating in the direction of the beam. Without initial waves, a strong linear beam instability can occur for streaming speeds above the Alfv¿n speed generating oblique proton-proton cyclotron waves through both cyclotron and Landau resonances. The initial beam speed can decelerate and saturate at speeds below the Alfv¿n speed. When nonlinear Alfv¿n waves are included in simulations, we find that the deceleration rates are enhanced. Deceleration is especially strong for initial super-Alfv¿nic speeds where we interpret the results with initial waves to be due to a wave amplification of the linear beam instability.

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Abstract

Keywords
Space Plasma Physics, Wave/particle interactions, Space Plasma Physics, Numerical simulation studies, Space Plasma Physics, Nonlinear phenomena, Interplanetary Physics, Solar wind plasma, wave particle interactions, numerical simulation studies, solar wind plasma
Journal
Journal of Geophysical Research
http://www.agu.org/journals/jb/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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