Solar Energetic Particle Acceleration in the Solar Corona with Simulated Field Line Random Walk and Wave Generation

Abstract:

Observations of extreme solar energetic particle (SEP) events associated with coronal mass ejection driven shocks have detected particle energies up to a few GeV at 1 AU within the first ~10 minutes to 1 hour of shock acceleration. It is currently not well understood whether or not shock acceleration can act alone in these events or if some combination of successive shocks or solar flares is required. To investigate this, we updated our current model which has been successfully applied to the termination shock and traveling interplanetary shocks. The model solves the time-dependent Focused Transport Equation including particle preheating due to the cross shock electric field and the divergence, adiabatic compression, and acceleration of the solar wind. Particle interaction with MHD wave turbulence is modeled in terms of gyro-resonant interactions with parallel propagating Alfvén waves and diffusive shock acceleration is included via the first-order Fermi mechanism for parallel shocks. The observed onset times of the extreme SEP events place the shock in the corona when the particles escape upstream, therefore, we extended our model to include coronal conditions for the solar wind and magnetic field. Additional features were introduced to investigate two aspects of MHD wave turbulence in contributing to efficient particle acceleration at a single fast parallel shock; (1) We simulate field-line random walk on time scales much larger than a particle gyro-period to investigate how the stochastic element added to particle injection and the first-order Fermi mechanism affects the efficiency of particle acceleration. (2) Previous modeling efforts show that the ambient solar wind turbulence is too weak to quickly accelerate SEPs to GeV energies. To improve the efficiency of acceleration for a single shock, we included upstream Alfvén wave amplification due to gyro-resonant interactions with SEPs and we constrained the wave growth to not violate the Bohm limit.