Relevant heating of the quiet solar corona by Alfven waves: a result of adiabaticity breakdown.

ABSTRACT: Ion heating by Alfvén waves has been considered for long as the mechanism explaining why the solar corona has a temperature several orders of magnitude higher than the photosphere. Unfortunately, as the measured wave frequencies are much smaller than the ion cyclotron frequency, particles were expected to behave adiabatically, impeding a direct wave-particle energy transfer to take place, except through decorrelating stochastic mechanisms related to broadband wave spectra. This paper proposes a new paradigm for this mechanism by showing it is actually much simpler, more general, and very efficient. Indeed, for measured wave amplitudes in the quiet corona, ion orbits are shown to cross quasi-periodically one or several slowly pulsating separatrices in phase space. Now, a separatrix is an or

SUBMITTER: Escande DF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6776755 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature