Speaker
Description
The nature and structure of the heliospheric magnetic field play an important role in the transport of energetic particles throughout the heliosphere, but due to solar wind turbulence these magnetic field-lines become stochastic. To simulate the meandering of the Parker spiral due to turbulence, the convection-diffusion equation for the field-line density distribution, which describes the dispersion of field-lines, is transformed into a set of stochastic differential equations which is then solved using both a forward and backward formulation. It is shown that the simulation results can be well-fitted by a two dimensional Gaussian with a standard deviation of about 25 degrees at 1 AU. It is further shown that the Parker spiral becomes more underwound, on average, as the solar wind turbulence increases. By applying the backward approach, the field-lines can be traced back to the Sun from an observer at 1 AU, thereby quantifying the probability of magnetic connection when interplanetary turbulence is accounted for.
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