Fluid simulations of mirror constraints on proton temperature anisotropy in solar wind turbulence

Abstract

Non-resonant ion perpendicular heating by low-frequency kinetic Alfvén wave turbulence, together with the constraining effect of the mirror instability on the developing temperature anisotropy observed in the solar wind, are simulated for the first time in a self-consistent way using a fluid model retaining low-frequency kinetic effects. This model which does not include solar wind expansion, concentrates on the influence of small-scale turbulence. It provides a sufficiently refined description of Landau damping and finite Larmor corrections to accurately capture the transverse dynamics at sub-ionic scales, including the self-regulating influence of the developing mirror modes. A fit of the simulation results with the usual mirror-instability threshold is obtained, reproducing the frontier of the slow solar wind WIND/SWE data in the (T ⊥i /T i, β i) diagram. The quality of the fit is improved in the presence of a small amount of collisions, which suggests that the deviations from bi-Maxwellianity in the slow solar wind are weak enough not to significantly affect the mirror threshold. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.