SHINE: Short-Wavelength Turbulence in the Solar Wind

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This award is expected to yield improved understanding of turbulence not only in the interplanetary medium, but also in the solar corona, through interplanetary and interstellar space, and to astrophysical plasmas throughout the Universe. The project will combine theoretical investigations, numerical simulations, and data analysis of spacecraft observations, contributing to the solar wind models along with similar efforts from other research teams. The expected research results will be broadly disseminated through conference presentations and publications in peer-reviewed journals; making them fully accessible to the international scientific community. Public talks to audiences such as high school students will be given in order to convey specific project results in the context of general space science education. The project will involve a junior postdoctoral researcher supporting the NSF Strategic Goals in discovery, learning, diversity, and interdisciplinary research.The main thrust of this SHINE project is to study fundamental properties of the short-wavelength turbulence in the solar wind, including processes by which fluctuating energy is transferred among various possible turbulence fields, as well as address the energy dissipation from those fluctuations into the heating of solar wind plasma. The primary goal of this research project is to obtain a comprehensive plasma physics description of the solar wind turbulence in observed frequencies above 0.5Hz, which correspond to the short-wavelength fluctuations of the order of or less than the proton inertial length. For such fluctuations, velocity-space processes are essential for understanding the physics of the solar wind plasma. The project team will use both hybrid and particle-in-cell simulation techniques to pursue theoretical and computational aspects of the research. The proposed observational studies will utilize data from several different spacecraft flying in the near-Earth's space, and these data will be closely related to the diagnostics of the numerical simulations.