SHINE: Short-Wavelength Turbulence in the Solar Wind

这一奖项不仅会提高人们对行星际介质中的湍流的理解，还会提高人们对日冕、行星际和星际空间以及整个宇宙的天体物理等离子体的理解。该项目将结合理论研究、数值模拟和航天器观测数据分析，与其他研究团队的类似努力一起为太阳风模型做出贡献。预期的研究结果将通过会议发言和同行评议期刊的出版物广泛传播；使国际科学界能够充分利用它们。为了在一般空间科学教育的背景下传达具体的项目成果，将对高中生等听众进行公开讲座。该项目将包括一名初级博士后研究员，支持国家科学基金会在发现、学习、多样性和跨学科研究方面的战略目标。该SHINE项目的主要任务是研究太阳风短波湍流的基本特性，包括波动能量在各种可能的湍流场之间传递的过程，以及解决这些波动的能量耗散到太阳风等离子体的加热中。本研究项目的主要目标是获得观测频率在0.5Hz以上的太阳风湍流的全面等离子体物理描述，该频率对应于质子惯性长度数量级或小于质子惯性长度的短波波动。对于这种波动，速度-空间过程对于理解太阳风等离子体的物理特性至关重要。项目团队将使用混合和细胞内粒子模拟技术来进行理论和计算方面的研究。拟议的观测研究将利用在近地空间飞行的几个不同航天器的数据，这些数据将与数值模拟的诊断密切相关。

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.