Speaker
Description
The heating of the solar corona is still an unanswered puzzle for solar physicists. Magnetic reconnection and wave heating models relying on MHD simulations are generally invoked to explain the coronal heating, which ignore some of the physics that occurs due to the interaction between ions and electrons. In the present work we turn to drift waves as a new candidate for the plasma heating mechanism in the solar atmosphere. We employ a two-fluid model (COOLFluiD) to the simulate the solar corona environment and provide a driving mechanism for the drift waves, i.e. a density gradient perpendicular to the ambient magnetic field. The model includes ions and electrons as separate species. We explore the effect that the scale of the density inhomogeneity presents in driving the waves. Most importantly we are interested in the heating effect of the plasma that the drift waves generate, the growth rate of the density modulation, and the transport effects that occur in the plasma due to the drift wave instability.
