Published in

American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 26(101), 2008

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.101.261103

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Hot Solar-Wind Helium: Direct Evidence for Local Heating by Alfven-Cyclotron Dissipation

Journal article published in 2008 by J. C. Kasper ORCID, A. J. Lazarus, S. P. Gary
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

A study of solar-wind hydrogen and helium temperature observations collected by the Wind spacecraft offers compelling evidence of heating by an Alfvén-cyclotron dissipation mechanism. Observations are sorted by the rate of Coulomb interactions, or collisional age, in the plasma and the differential flow between the two species. We show that helium is preferentially heated perpendicular to the magnetic field direction by more than a factor of 6 when the flow between the species is small relative to the Alfvén wave speed and collisions are infrequent. These signatures are consistent with predictions of dissipation in the presence of multiple ion species. We also report an unexpected result: observations of efficient heating of helium parallel to the magnetic field for large differential flow relative to the sound speed.