Pickup Ion Production in the Global Heliosphere and Heliosheath and Their Diagnostics by Fluxes of Energetic Neutral Atoms

Abstract:

An anisotropic particle transport model, based on an expansion of a focused transport equation in Legendre polynomials, is used here as a tool to analyze the distributions of pickup ions (PUIs) in the heliosphere and heliosheath. A three-dimensional, MHD-kinetic model for flows of a thermal plasma, neutral atoms and PUIs has been developed. The preliminary results from our model are in qualitative agreement with observations made by New Horizons, Ulysses, Voyager 1 and 2. All-sky maps of energetic neutral atoms (ENA) fluxes with energies of about 0.2-6 keV based on our current PUI model are qualitatively similar to IBEX-Hi distributed ENA maps. Also, simulated spectra of ENA fluxes nearly match IBEX-Hi spectra of distributed ENA fluxes. It is demonstrated that preserving some pitch-angle information of the PUI distribution is important for correctly interpreting the data.