The Effect of Solar Wind on Charged Particles’ Diffusion Coefficients

Abstract

The transport of energetic charged particles through magnetized plasmas is ubiquitous in interplanetary space and astrophysics, and the important physical quantities are the parallel and perpendicular diffusion coefficients of energetic charged particles. In this paper, the influence of solar wind on particle transport is investigated. Using the focusing equation, we obtain parallel and perpendicular diffusion coefficients, accounting for the solar wind effect. For different conditions, the relative importance of the solar wind effect to diffusion is investigated. It is shown that, when energetic charged particles are close to the Sun, for parallel diffusion, the solar wind effect needs to be taken into account. These results are important for studying energetic charged particle transport processes in the vicinity of the Sun.

Transport of energetic particles in turbulent space plasmas: pitch-angle scattering, telegraph, and diffusion equations

“…In addition to studies of the basic pitch-angle scattering equation (Shalchi et al, 2011;Tautz and Lerche, 2016;Lasuik and Shalchi, 2019), authors have explored the impact of so-called focusing, an effect which is related to a non-constant mean magnetic field (Danos et al, 2013;Litvinenko and Schlickeiser, 2013;Effenberger and Litvinenko, 2014;Wang and Qin, 2020;Wang and Qin, 2021;Wang and Qin, 2023). Even more complicated cases, including perpendicular particle transport, have been investigated by Wang and Qin (2024).…”