High-resolution Simulations of the Inner Heliosphere in Search of the Kelvin–Helmholtz Waves

Abstract

The Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI) can be generated at velocity shears in plasmas. While shears are abundant in the solar wind, whether they generate KHI in situ remains an open question, because of the lack of models that can simultaneously resolve the global structure of the expanding solar wind and the local structure of much smaller-scale velocity shears. In this paper, we use the Grid Agnostic MHD for Extended Research Applications model whose high resolving power, in combination with a highly refined spatial grid, allowed us to extend the simulation from global scales roughly into the first decade of the inertial range (∼1.5 × 10 5 km, which we refer to as mesoscale). We employ this computational capability to extract from the simulation the local properties of radial and azimuthal solar wind velocity shears and investigate their KH stability using a linear dispersion relation, which includes both the finite width of the shear and plasma compressibility. We find that radial shears, which dominate the global structure of the inner heliosphere, are stabilized by compressibility. However, depending on the local Alfvén speed, sound speed, shear thickness, and the strength of the stabilizing azimuthal magnetic field, the azimuthal shears generated inside stream interaction regions could be KH-unstable. While our highly resolved simulation allowed us to analyze the local properties of the velocity shears, its resolution was still insufficient to confirm the instability. We argue that even higher resolution simulations are required to reproduce in situ generation of KHI at velocity shears in the solar wind.