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Modeling Solar Cosmic Ray Transport within the Ecliptic Plane / Modellierung des Transports solarer energiereicher Teilchen in der Ebene der Ekliptik

Since six decades the understanding of interplanetary propagation of solar flare accelerated, energetic charged particles in the inner heliosphere has not yet achieved sufficient closure. The essential mechanisms acting on these charged particles, which perform helical orbits along the large-scale magnetic field lines as probes, have already been identified. However, in particular the impact of the three-dimensional, small-scale magnetic fluctuations on the particles' trajectories has not yet been fully understood. These
superimposed disturbances are expected to interact with the charges via resonance principle
– leading to both field-aligned scattering and diffusive cross-field displacements of
the particles' guiding center.
Since numerical solutions and known theoretical formulations have failed to verify the measurements so far, Ruffolo's equation – which is a special formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation – is applied to take account of the current knowledge about field-parallel transport; The partial differential equation is extended to a two-dimensional model within
the ecliptic plane by a spatial diffusion term perpendicular to the field. We assume an
idealized Archimedean field neither with polarity changes nor large-scale disturbances
such as traveling magneto-hydrodynamic shock waves or magnetic clouds.
The transport equation is solved numerically by finite differences. For typical ratios of perpendicular to parallel diffusion coefficient as deduced from theory, various fits have been found in good agreement with multi-spacecraft measurements. Some events and the occurrence of observed sudden flux drop-outs suggest that scattering on magnetic field irregularities significantly varies from one flux tube to another. In addition to the already existing, but sparse set of particle observations at different positions, once the current solar minimum has passed by, a new set will be available from the recently launched STEREO satellites.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uni-osnabrueck.de/oai:repositorium.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de:urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-2012040410112
Date04 April 2012
CreatorsLampa, Florian
ContributorsProf. Dr. May-Britt Kallenrode, Prof. Dr. Philipp Maass
Source SetsUniversität Osnabrück
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:doctoralThesis
Formatapplication/zip, application/pdf
Rightshttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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