Self‐consistent injection and acceleration of pickup ions at the solar wind termination shock

Abstract

A unified description of pickup and anomalous cosmic ray proton transport in the near ecliptic regions of the upwind heliosphere is presented. Multiply reflected ion acceleration theory is used for the injection of pickup protons into the diffusive shock acceleration mechanism, so yielding the anomalous cosmic ray component at the quasi‐perpendicular termination shock. The results show that both the multiply reflected and simultaneously accelerated pickup protons and the anomalous protons significantly modify the termination shock. Although the shock mediation lowers the cut‐off speed of the accelerated pickup protons, a sufficient large population of anomalous protons is accelerated at the termination shock to give a favorable comparison of the modulated anomalous proton spectra up‐stream with observations at large heliocentric distances.