Impact of pickup ions on the shock front nonstationarity andenergy dissipation of the heliospheric termination shock:Two-dimensional full particle simulations and comparison withVoyager 2 observations

Abstract:

Voyager 2 (V2) observed multiple crossings of the heliospheric termination shock (TS) on 2007 August 31-September 1 at a distance of 84 AU from the Sun. Here, for therst time we present two-dimensional (2-D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of the TS including pickup ions (PUIs) self-consistently, and compare the simulation results with V2 observations. Wend that: (1) PUIs play a key role in the energy dissipation of the TS, and most of the incident ion kinetic energy is transferred to the thermal energy of PUIs. The PIC simulation indicates for the upstream parameters chosen for V2 conditions that the density of PUIs is about 25% and the PUIs gain the largest fraction (approximately 86.6%) of the downstream thermal pressure. (2) The simulated heliosheath ion distribution function is a superposition of a cold core formed by transmitted solar wind ions (SWIs), the shoulders contributed by the hot re ected SWIs and directly transmitted PUIs, and the wings of the distribution dominated by the very hot re ected PUIs. The V2 Faraday cups observed the cool core of the distribution, so they saw only a tip of the iceberg. (3) The nonstationarity of the shock front is mainly caused by ripples along the shock front and these ripples form even if the percentage of PUIs is high. These simulation results agree reasonably well with the V2 experimental data. The relevance of the shock front ripples to the multiple TS crossings observed by V2 is also discussed in this paper.