A NEW COSMIC RAY TRANSPORT THEORY IN PARTIALLY TURBULENT SPACE PLASMAS: EXTENDING THE QUASILINEAR APPROACH

Abstract

A new transport theory of cosmic rays in magnetized space plasmas with axisymmetric incompressible magnetic turbulence is developed extending the quasilinear approximation to the particle orbit. Arbitrary gyrophase deviations from the unperturbed spiral orbits in the uniform magnetic field are allowed. For quasi-stationary and spatially homogeneous magnetic turbulence, we derive the small Larmor radius approximation gyrophase-averaged cosmic ray Fokker-Planck coefficients. The generalized Fokker-Planck coefficients correctly reduce to their known quasilinear values in the corresponding limit. New forms of the quasilinear Fokker-Planck coefficients in axisymmetric turbulence are derived which no longer involve infinite sums of products of Bessel functions, which facilitate their numerical computation for specified turbulence field correlation tensors. The Fokker-Planck coefficients for arbitrary phase orbits of the cosmic ray particles provide strict upper limits for the perpendicular and pitch-angle Fokker-Planck coefficients, which in turn yield strict upper and lower limits for the perpendicular and parallel spatial diffusion coefficients, respectively, describing the spatial diffusion of the isotropic part of the cosmic ray phase space density. For the associated mean free paths, we find for this general case that the product of the minimum parallel mean free path with the sum of the maximum perpendicular mean free paths equals R 2 L , where RL denotes the cosmic ray gyroradius.