Nonlinear damping of slab modes and cosmic ray transport

TL;DR

This paper uses recent theoretical developments to improve calculations of cosmic ray transport, showing that larger mean free paths align better with solar wind observations.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach applying recent correlation time scale results to cosmic ray scattering, enhancing the accuracy of mean free path predictions.

Findings

Larger parallel mean free paths than previous models

Better agreement with solar wind observations

Improved cosmic ray transport modeling

Abstract

By applying recent results for the slab correlation time scale onto cosmic ray scattering theory, we compute cosmic ray parallel mean free paths within the quasilinear limit. By employing these results onto charged particle transport in the solar system, we demonstrate that much larger parallel mean free paths can be obtained in comparison to previous results. A comparison with solar wind observations is also presented to show that the new theoretical results are much closer to the observations than the previous results.