Ubiquitous statistical acceleration in the solar wind

Abstract

One of the more interesting observations by ACE is the ubiquitous presence of higher energy tails on the distribution functions of solar wind and pickup ions. The tails occur continuously in the slow solar wind, but less so in fast wind. Their presence is not correlated with the passage of shock waves. It is pointed out that statistical acceleration by transit-time damping of propagating magnitude fluctuations in the magnetic field of the solar wind is a likely mechanism to yield the observed tails. © 2000 American Institute of Physics.