Alfvenic Turbulence from the Sun to 65 Solar Radii: Numerical predictions.

Abstract:

The upcoming NASA Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission will fly to within 9 solar radii from the solar surface, about 7 times closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft has ever reached. This historic mission will gather unprecedented remote-sensing data and the first in-situ measurements of the plasma in the solar atmosphere, which will revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of turbulence and other processes that heat the solar corona and accelerate the solar wind. This close to the Sun the background solar-wind properties are highly inhomogeneous. As a result, outward-propagating Alfven waves (AWs) arising from the random motions of the photospheric magnetic-field footpoints undergo strong non-WKB reflections and trigger a vigorous turbulent cascade. In this talk I will discuss recent progress in the understanding of reflection-driven Alfven turbulence in this scenario by means of high-resolution numerical simulations, with the goal of predicting the detailed nature of the velocity and magnetic field fluctuations that the SPP mission will measure. In particular, I will place special emphasis on relating the simulations to relevant physical mechanisms that might govern the radial evolution of the turbulence spectra of outward/inward-propagating fluctuations and discuss the conditions that lead to universal power-laws.