Self Consistent Models of the Solar Wind

TL;DR

This paper reviews self-consistent models of solar wind acceleration, emphasizing the role of Alfvén wave turbulence in coronal heating and wind acceleration, and compares model predictions with observations.

Contribution

It highlights recent models based on Alfvén wave turbulence that successfully reproduce observed solar wind features and discusses key issues in modeling coronal heating.

Findings

Models with Alfvén wave turbulence match observed plasma properties.

Coronal heating rate remains a major modeling challenge.

Future work needed to resolve remaining questions about solar wind acceleration.

Abstract

The origins of the hot solar corona and the supersonically expanding solar wind are still the subject of much debate. This paper summarizes some of the essential ingredients of realistic and self-consistent models of solar wind acceleration. It also outlines the major issues in the recent debate over what physical processes dominate the mass, momentum, and energy balance in the accelerating wind. A key obstacle in the way of producing realistic simulations of the Sun-heliosphere system is the lack of a physically motivated way of specifying the coronal heating rate. Recent models that assume the energy comes from Alfven waves that are partially reflected, and then dissipated by magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, have been found to reproduce many of the observed features of the solar wind. This paper discusses results from these models, including detailed comparisons with measured plasma properties as a function of solar wind speed. Some suggestions are also given for future work that could answer the many remaining questions about coronal heating and solar wind acceleration.