Change of Characteristic Ion Length Scales and Spectral Properties of Magnetic Field Fluctuations Across Different Types of Interplanetary Shocks
Abstrakt
The interaction between interplanetary (IP) shocks and solar wind has been studied for the understanding of energy dissipation mechanisms within collisionless plasmas. Compared to the study of the interaction with fast shocks, less attention has been directed to the interaction with other types of IP shocks including slow mode shocks (i.e., fast forward, fast reverse, slow forward and slow reverse).
In this paper, we analyze IP shocks observed by Wind spacecraft from 1995 to 2015. Evolution of spectral indices in the ion inertial and kinetic ranges for the upstream and downstream magnetic field fluctuations are estimated by continuous wavelet transform.
Furthermore, the changes of distributions of characteristic ion length scales with respect to the spectral break induced by the shocks are presented.