Short-Period Features of the Interplanetary Plasma and Their Evolution

The solar wind plasma exhibits many features of the solar surface passed on to the interplanetary medium as temporal variations due to the solar rotation. The yearly average values of solar wind velocity, and geomagnetic index A _p during 1965–1999 were found to exhibit long period evolution. They were found to peak around the declining phase of each solar cycle. While the solar wind velocity peaks around the second half of the declining phase, the IMF field strength increases around the first half of the declining phase of each solar cycle. The power spectrum of these parameters shows peaks around 37-day, 30-day, 27-day, 13.5-day, 9-day, and 7-day periods. The temporal evolution of the power spectrum of the solar wind plasma parameters and the geomagnetic activity index A _p are also studied in detail and presented with the help of contour graphs. These studies indicate that the strength of the quasi-periodicities in the interplanetary medium evolves with time.     

Wavelet Analysis of solar,solar wind and geomagnetic parameters

The sunspot number, solar wind plasma, interplanetary magnetic field, and geomagnetic activity index A _p have been analyzed using a wavelet technique to look for the presence of periods and the temporal evolution of these periods. The global wavelet spectra of these parameters, which provide information about the temporal average strength of quasi periods, exhibit the presence of a variety of prominent quasi periods around 16 years, 10.6 years, 9.6 years, 5.5 years, 1.3 years, 180 days, 154 days, 27 days, and 14 days. The wavelet spectra of sunspot number during 1873–2000, geomagnetic activity index A _p during 1932–2000, and solar wind velocity and interplanetary magnetic field during 1964–2000 indicate that their spectral power evolves with time. In general, the power of the oscillations with a period of less than one year evolves rapidly with the phase of the solar cycle with their peak values changing from one cycle to the next. The temporal evolution of wavelet power in R _z, v _sw, n, B _y, B _z, |B|, and A _p for each of the prominent quasi periods is studied in detail.     

Anomalous resistivity in the geomagnetic tail region

The beam cyclotron instability and electron acoustic instability, driven by cross-tail current and inhomogeneity in density and magnetic field, are found to be unstable in the earth's magnetic tail region. The anomalous resistivities due to these instabilities are found to be of the order of $\text{(10}{}^{\mathrm{?1}}\text{?10}{}^{\mathrm{?3}}\text{)Ω}{}_{\mathrm{e}}{}^{\mathrm{?1}}$ (Ω_e being the electron gyro frequency). It is also suggested that the non-linear saturation of the beam cyclotron instability may lead to conditions favourable for exciting ion acoustic instability.     

Solar wind heating by heat conduction driven ion acoustic instability

Nonlinear saturation of the ion acoustic instability, driven by finite heat conduction in the solar wind, via resonance broadening is considered. The calculations based on the Hartle and Sturrock model show that this process can heat ions faster than the electrons, thereby, leading to the reduction in electron to proton temperature ratio. The difficulty with this process is that it increases the electron temperature above the value predicted by the Hartle and Sturrock model.     

On the cause of geomagnetic activity at Hale sector boundary

The solar wind velocity and density have been studied around the interplanetary magnetic field sector boundaries (+ to ? and ? to +) during 1965–1974, separating the data into autumnal and vernal periods. It is noticed that the solar wind velocity shows a sharp increase around the Hale type of sector boundary in both northern and southern heliosphere indicating a more favourable condition for the high speed stream after Hale type of sector boundary crossing than non-Hale boundary.     

Coronal heating by ion acoustic waves

A quantitative study is made based on the suggestion that coronal heating results from Landau damping of ion acoustic waves. It is shown that both ions and electrons are heated by nonlinear saturation of ion acoustic instability. Ions are heated more rapidly than the electrons.     

Ion acoustic instability in the presence of plasma turbulence in the solar wind

The adiabatic theory of interaction between high and low frequency waves has been studied for the case of electron plasma oscillations and ion acoustic waves and the results are applied to the solar wind. The modified dispersion relation for ion acoustic waves has been derived, taking a Gaussian distribution for plasmons. Two limiting cases of the spectrum are studied. For a broad spectrum, the plasma turbulence has a destabilising effect by introducing a growth rate denoted by turbulence, which is positive for k ₀ > (m _e/ m _i )^1/2 _De ^–1 , k ₀ being the central wave numger of the spectrum, _De the electron Debye length. Also, even for v _d(drift velocity between electrons and ions) < c _s, we arrive at unstable ion acoustic modes. For narrow spectrum, the plasma turbulence has a stabilising effect.     

Fractal-Based Fuzzy Technique For Detection Of Active Regions From Solar Images

Fractal concepts are used to describe the irregular structures and regions of interest of solar images. The most common and easiest way to extract regions of interest from an image is through segmentation. Segmentation techniques vary from conventional edge-detection mechanism to fuzzy c-means clustering. In this study, the pixelwise local fractal dimension of solar images is computed by different techniques. This is followed by different segmentation procedures including the fuzzy-based approach, for extracting the active regions from chromospheric images and assessing their performance. These techniques have also been applied on solar images to extract active regions from Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Extreme Ultraviolet Telescope (EIT) images.     

Heating and acceleration of α-particles in the solar wind

The non-linear saturation of whistler mode instability in the solar wind is considered here. The resulting heating and acceleration are calculated. It is shown that this instability heats predominantly the -particles and the ratio of heating rates of -particles to ions have been calculated. This instability is shown to be effective in accelerating -particles than ions. However, this process cannot account for V /V _i 1.