Abstract
Magnetic energy of a plasma, expanding under the constraint of magnetic helicity conservation, decreases with expansion. Part of this lost magnetic energy might go into heating the plasma. This is used to explain the high temperatures observed in interplanetary magnetic clouds (IMCs). IMCs are modeled as intrinsic-scale flux ropes ejected from the Sun, and it is assumed that their total magnetic helicity, flux and mass are conserved during evolution. The temperature of an expanding cloud goes through a maximum that may be two orders of magnitude higher than the starting value. The model also provides scaling laws for the magnetic field strength, temperature, radial size, density, asymmetry of the magnetic field strength profile, slope of the plasma velocity profile inside clouds, and plasma beta, as functions of distance from the Sun which are then compared with the cloud data obtained between 0.3 and 4 AU from the Sun.
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