Oblique Alfv\'en waves in a stellar wind environment with dust particles charged by inelastic collisions and by photoionization

TL;DR

This paper investigates how oblique Alfvén waves behave in a dusty stellar wind environment, highlighting the effects of dust charging through inelastic collisions and photoionization on wave dispersion and damping.

Contribution

It introduces a kinetic model for dusty plasmas including photoionization effects, revealing new wave behaviors and damping characteristics influenced by radiation flux.

Findings

Dust causes zero-frequency regions in shear Alfvén waves.

Minimum wavelength for dispersive waves scales with radiation intensity.

Higher radiation flux reduces damping rates of Alfvén waves.

Abstract

The characteristics of Alfv\'en waves propagating in a direction oblique to the ambient magnetic field in a stellar wind environment are discussed. A kinetic formulation for a magnetized dusty plasma is adopted considering Maxwellian distributions of electrons and ions, and immobile dust particles electrically charged by absorption of plasma particles and by photoionization. The dispersion relation is numerically solved and the results are compared with situations previously studied where dust particles were not charged by photoionization, which is an important process in a stellar wind of a relatively hot star. We show that the presence of dust causes the shear Alfv\'en waves to present a region of wavenumber values with zero frequency and that the minimum wavelength for which the mode becomes dispersive again is roughly proportional to the radiation intensity to which the dust grains are exposed. The damping rates of both shear and compressional Alfv\'en waves are observed to decrease with increasing radiation flux, for the parameters considered. For the particular case where both modes present a region with null real frequency when the radiation flux is absent or weak, it is shown that when the radiation flux is sufficiently strong, the photoionization mechanism may cause this region to get smaller or even to vanish, for compressional Alfv\'en waves. In that case, the compressional Alfv\'en waves present non zero frequency for all wavenumber values, while the shear Alfv\'en waves still present null frequency in a certain interval of wavenumber values, which gets smaller with the presence of radiation.