The change of properties of solar wind turbulence across different types of interplanetary shocks

Abstract

<p>The interaction between interplanetary (IP) shocks and solar wind has been studied for the understanding of energy dissipation mechanisms and the properties of turbulence (e.g., cross helicity, residual energy, proton temperature anisotropy, magnetic compressibility, etc.) within collisionless plasmas. Compared to the study of the interaction with fast shocks, less attention has been directed to the interaction with other types of IP shocks including slow mode shocks (i.e., fast forward, fast reverse, slow forward and slow reverse). We analyze IP shocks observed by the Wind spacecraft from 1995 to 2021. Spectral indices in the ion inertial and kinetic ranges for the upstream and downstream magnetic field fluctuations are estimated by continuous wavelet transform. The changes of the plasma turbulence properties and the distributions of characteristic proton length scales are presented. We preliminarily found that spectral indices in both inertial and kinetic ranges and the distributions of characteristic proton length scales are statistically conserved across the investigated shocks. Mechanisms associated with the energy dissipation can be seen unaffected by shock. Other turbulence properties—cross helicity, residual energy and proton temperature anisotropy—evolve without a significant modification as well.</p>