Dissipation mechanism of interplanetary alfvenic fluctuation

Abstract

Observations on board Helios 1 and 2 have shown that, in 0.3–0.9 AU, the decay of the Alfvenic fluctuations is greater than is calculated by the WBK solution of the propagation of Alfven waves. The additional decay can be expressed by an exponential factor with a “dissipation length” λ, which varies with the frequency but is approximately constant for frequencies higher than 0.01 Hz. In this paper, we deduce the analytical expression for the dissipation length in both the wave energy cascade model, given in a previous work [7] and the viscous decay model [8]. After inserting the observed values of the solar wind parameters, we find the dissipation length given by the cascade model agrees with the observed length both in size and in its variation with frequency, while the one given by the viscous decay model differs greatly from the observations.