Wave-particle instabilities driven by departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium have been conjectured to play a role in governing solar wind dynamics. We calculate the statistical variation of linear stability over a large subset of Helios I and II observations of the fast solar wind using a numerical evaluation of the Nyquist stability criterion, accounting for multiple sources of free energy associated with protons and helium including temperature anisotropies and relative drifts. We find that 88% of the surveyed intervals are linearly unstable. The median growth rate of the unstable modes is within an order of magnitude of the turbulent transfer rate, fast enough to potentially impact the turbulent scale-to-scale energy transfer. This rate does not significantly change with radial distance, though the nature of the unstable modes, and which ion components are responsible for driving the instabilities, does vary. The effect of ion-ion collisions on stability is found to be significant; collisionally young wind is much more unstable than collisionally old wind, with very different kinds of instabilities present in the two kinds of wind.

The solar wind is a magnetized plasma and as such exhibits collective plasma behavior associated with its characteristic spatial and temporal scales. The characteristic length scales include the size of the heliosphere, the collisional mean free paths of all species, their inertial lengths, their gyration radii, and their Debye lengths. The characteristic timescales include the expansion time, the collision times, and the periods associated with gyration, waves, and oscillations. We review the past and present research into the multi-scale nature of the solar wind based on in-situ spacecraft measurements and plasma theory. We emphasize that couplings of processes across scales are important for the global dynamics and thermodynamics of the solar wind. We describe methods to measure in-situ properties of particles and fields. We then discuss the role of expansion effects, non-equilibrium distribution functions, collisions,

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It has long been known that the energy in velocity and magnetic field fluctuations in the solar wind is not in equipartition. In this paper, we present an analysis of 5 years of Wind data at 1 AU to investigate the reason for this. The residual energy (difference between energy in velocity and magnetic field fluctuations) was calculated using both the standard magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) normalization for the magnetic field and a kinetic version, which includes temperature anisotropies and drifts between particle species. It was found that with the kinetic normalization, the fluctuations are closer to equipartition, with a mean normalized residual energy of σ r = −0.19 and mean Alfvén ratio of r A = 0.71. The spectrum of residual energy, in the kinetic normalization, was found to be steeper than both the velocity and magnetic field spectra, consistent with some recent MHD turbulence predictions and numerical simulations, having a spectral index close to -1.9. The local properties of residual energy and cross helicity were also investigated, showing that globally balanced intervals with small residual energy contain local patches of larger imbalance and larger residual energy at all scales, as expected for non-linear turbulent interactions.

[1] We present observations of electromagnetic precursor waves, identified as whistler mode waves, at supercritical interplanetary shocks using the Wind search coil magnetometer. The precursors propagate obliquely with respect to the local magnetic field, shock normal vector, solar wind velocity, and they are not phase standing structures. All are right-hand polarized with respect to the magnetic field (spacecraft frame), and all but one are right-hand polarized with respect to the shock normal vector in the normal incidence frame. They have rest frame frequencies f ci < f ≪ f ce and wave numbers 0.02 ≲ kr ce ≲ 5.0. Particle distributions show signatures of specularly reflected gyrating ions, which may be a source of free energy for the observed modes. In one event, we simultaneously observe perpendicular ion heating and parallel electron acceleration, consistent with wave heating/acceleration due to these waves. Although the precursors can have dB/B o as large as 2, fluxgate magnetometer measurements show relatively laminar shock transitions in three of the four events.

Temperature anisotropy in the solar wind results from a combination of mechanisms of anisotropic heating (e.g., cyclotron-resonant heating and dissipation of kinetic Alfvén 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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Plasma carrying a spectrum of counter-propagating field-aligned ion-cyclotron waves can strongly and preferentially heat ions through a stochastic Fermi mechanism. Such a process has been proposed to explain the extreme temperatures, temperature anisotropies, and speeds of ions in the solar corona and solar wind. We quantify how differential flow between ion species results in a Doppler shift in the wave spectrum that can prevent this strong heating. Two critical values of differential flow are derived for strong heating of the core and tail of a given ion distribution function. Our comparison of these predictions to observations from the Wind spacecraft reveals excellent agreement. Solar wind helium that meets the condition for strong core heating is nearly seven times hotter than hydrogen on average. Ion-cyclotron resonance contributes to heating in the solar wind, and there is a close link between heating, differential flow, and temperature anisotropy. Introduction.-The solar corona and solar wind are so tenuous that wave-particle interactions can dominate over fluid or collisional processes, resulting in highly nonthermal plasma as seen by spacecraft in interplanetary space. Heavier ions escape from the Sun at higher speeds than the ionized hydrogen (H + ) that dominates the solar wind. Within a given solar wind stream, different species flow through one another at speeds of up to several hundred km s −1 [1,2]. This differential flow appears to be stable as long as it is aligned with the local magnetic field B and below the Alfvén wave speed C A [3,4]. Heavier ions are also often much hotter than H + , with temperatures reaching and often exceeding mass proportionality [5][6][7][8]. These non-thermal properties can be used to identify the role wave-particle interactions play in heating the corona and solar wind [9][10][11]. If we can understand the underlying physics, we will be able to predict the relative heating of ions and electrons in the solar wind, the corona and other magnetized plasmas.