Abstract
A selection of topics in plasma physics and hydrodynamics relevant to the heliosphere is presented. The first three sections cover basic defining properties of a plasma, the essentials of particle orbit theory, including conservation of magnetic moment and the various drifts, and an introduction to kinetic theory, with an heuristic derivation of relaxation times. The fourth section is devoted to the hydrodynamic description of the solar wind, and is a pedagogical introduction to Parker’s theory as well as to the methods of hydrodynamic and plasma stability. In the fifth and final section we return to the kinetic description of the solar wind plasmas and explore recent versions of the collisionless, or exospheric, models of wind acceleration, and compare their predictive merits and faults with those of the more widely studied fluid theories vis à vis in situ and remote observations of the corona and wind.
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Velli, M. (1998). Heliospheric plasma physics: an introduction. In: Vial, J.C., Bocchialini, K., Boumier, P. (eds) Space Solar Physics. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 507. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0106922
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0106922
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