A review on solar wind modeling: kinetic and fluid aspects

TL;DR

This review compares kinetic and fluid models of the solar wind, highlighting their advantages, limitations, and recent developments, and discusses how these approaches complement each other in understanding solar wind dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of kinetic and fluid solar wind models, emphasizing their complementarity and outlining future research directions.

Findings

Kinetic models incorporate electric field effects and non-Maxwellian VDFs.

Fluid models successfully reproduce solar wind macroscopic properties.

Collisions, especially Coulomb interactions, remain a complex open problem.

Abstract

We review the main advantages and limitations of the kinetic exospheric and fluid models of the solar wind (SW). We discuss the hydrostatic model imagined by Chapman, the first supersonic hydrodynamic models published by Parker and the first generation subsonic kinetic model proposed by Chamberlain. It is shown that a correct estimation of the electric field as in the second generation kinetic exospheric models developed by Lemaire and Scherer, provides a supersonic expansion of the corona, reconciling the hydrodynamic and the kinetic approach. The third generation kinetic exospheric models considers kappa velocity distribution function (VDF) instead of a Maxwellian at the exobase and in addition they treat a non-monotonic variation of the electric potential with the radial distance; the fourth generation exospheric models include Coulomb collisions based on the Fokker--Planck collision term. Multi-fluid models of the solar wind provide a coarse grained description and reproduce with success the spatio-temporal variation of SW macroscopic properties (density, bulk velocity). The main categories of multi-fluid SW models are reviewed: the 5-moment, or Euler, models, originally proposed by Parker to describe the supersonic SW expansion; the 8-moment and 16-moment fluid models, the gyrotropic approach with improved collision terms as well as the gyrotropic models based on observed VDFs. The outstanding problem of collisions, including the long range Coulomb encounters, is also discussed, both in the kinetic and multi-fluid context. Although for decades the two approaches have been seen as opposed, in this paper we emphasize their complementary. The review of the kinetic and fluid models of the solar wind contributes also to a better evaluation of the open questions still existent in SW modeling and suggests possible future developments.