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Study of the solar wind multicomponent structure and its variations in interaction regions
Ďurovcová, Tereza ; Šafránková, Jana (advisor) ; Borovsky, Joseph Eric (referee) ; Mostafavi, Parisa (referee)
The solar wind is a multicomponent plasma consisting of protons, electrons, and smaller amounts of heavy ions. Often, two proton populations moving different speeds occur simultaneously. The more abundant one is called the proton core and the less abundant one the proton beam. Among the ions heavier than protons, α particles (fully ionized helium) are the only species that significantly affect the solar wind dynamics and thermodynamics due to their highest abundance. The differences between the proton and α particle parameters are often used to identify the source regions of solar wind streams. However, the stream interactions and other processes can change mutual rela- tions between the solar wind components. The less abundant but important components (α particles and proton beam) can thus serve as probes of those processes. The aim of the thesis is to study their contribution to variations of the solar wind and winds perturbed by stream interactions. To contribute to these topics, both statistical and case studies of the spacecraft observations at distances 0.3 to 1 AU from the Sun were performed. This required a reprocessing of the Helios measurements to obtain not only the parameters of the dominant proton core, but also the proton beam and α particle parameters. We found a connection between the proton...
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