Particle Acceleration at Filamentary Structures Downstream of Collisionless Shocks in the Heliosphere.

Abstract:

Collisionless shocks are an important feature in astrophysical, heliospheric and magnetospheric settings. At these structures plasma is heated, the properties of flows are changed, and particles are accelerated to high energies. Particles are accelerated throughout the heliosphere. There are no times or conditions where suprathermal ions forming tails are not present on the solar wind ion distribution, and given the low speeds of these particles they must be accelerated locally in the heliosphere. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and co-rotating interaction regions (CIRs) accelerate particles up to 10s of MeV/nucleon. The termination shock of the solar and the heliosheath produce energetic particles including the Anomalous Cosmic Rays (ACRs), with energies in excess of 100 MeV. In the last few years’ very interesting observations at low energies showing power laws that cannot be explained with commonly accepted acceleration mechanisms and thus increased the need for alternative acceleration processes.

Fully consistent kinetic particle simulations such as hybrid simulations appear to be a powerful tool to investigated ion acceleration. Nowadays these simulations can be performed in 3D and relative large simulation domains covering up to hundreds of ion inertial length in size and thus representing the MHD scale.

These 3D hybrid simulations show filamentary magnetic and density structures, which could be interpreted as small-scale flux ropes. The growth of these small-scale structures is also associated with ion acceleration. In this talk we will discuss properties of these filamentary structures, their spatial and temporal evolution and the particle dynamics during the acceleration process. The results of this study may be of particular importance for future high resolution magnetospheric and heliospheric mission such as THOR.