Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 107, Issue 20, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.201101
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Funding
- NASA [NNX08AW07G]
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Div Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences [0962726] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- NASA [94348, NNX08AW07G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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Temperature anisotropy in the solar wind results from a combination of mechanisms of anisotropic heating (e.g., cyclotron-resonant heating and dissipation of kinetic Alfven waves) and cooling (e.g., Chew-Goldberger-Low double-adiabatic expansion). In contrast, anisotropy-driven instabilities such as the cyclotron, mirror, and firehose instabilities limit the allowable departure of the plasma from isotropy. This study used data from the Faraday cups on the Wind spacecraft to examine scalar temperature and temperature components of protons. Plasma unstable to the mirror or firehose instability was found to be about 3-4 times hotter than stable plasma. Since anisotropy-driven instabilities are not understood to heat the plasma, these results suggest that heating processes are more effective than cooling processes at creating and maintaining proton temperature anisotropy in the solar wind.
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