ANATOMY OF DEPLETED INTERPLANETARY CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS

We report a subset of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) containing distinct periods of anomalous heavy-ion charge state composition and peculiar ion thermal properties measured by ACE/SWICS from 1998 to 2011. We label them depleted ICMEs, identified by the presence of intervals where C6+/C5+ and O7+/O6+ depart from the direct correlation expected after their freeze-in heights. These anomalous intervals within the depleted ICMEs are referred to as Depletion Regions. We find that a depleted ICME would be indistinguishable from all other ICMEs in the absence of the Depletion Region, which has the defining property of significantly low abundances of fully charged species of helium, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Similar anomalies in the slow solar wind were discussed by Zhao et al. We explore two possibilities for the source of the Depletion Region associated with magnetic reconnection in the tail of a CME, using CME simulations of the evolution of two Earth-bound CMEs described by Manchester et al.