THE PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENT PICK-UP ION SPECIES IN THE HELIOSPHERE AND THEIR CONVECTION TOWARDS THE 3-DIMENSIONAL TERMINATION SHOCK

The production of different pick-up ion species in the heliosphere due to local ionization of corresponding neutral gas species entering from the local interstellar medium is investigated. Starting from the usual values for the cosmic elemental abundances and taking into account the most probable conditions for a fractional ionization of the local interstellar medium, we consider first the effect of an element-selective interface transmission in order to achieve values for the inflow of neutral elements into the heliosphere. It is then shown that the element-specific heliospheric distributions of neutral gases in connection with the relevant local ionization rates lead to element-specific upwind-downwind asymmetries in the resulting pick-up ion production rates. Starting from those we calculate spatial heliospheric patterns of pick-up ion fluxes for the different species assuming that these species are essentially convected with the solar wind bulk flow towards the outer heliospheric regions. As we are going to show here, the effects of specific ion drifts and diffusive motions superimposed on the solar wind bulk motion in all cases can be considered as negligible, unless pick-up ion energies at their convection to larger heliospheric distances are substantially increased by factors of the order of 100 or more. We present radial and longitudinal profiles of the different pick-up ion fluxes which, upon their arrival at the termination shock, may serve as measure of production rates for corresponding anomalous cosmic ray species.