On Alfven waves in the solar breeze

The application to the solar wind motivates the consideration of Alfven waves in a radial background magnetic field and radial mean flow, in two cases, viz., with velocity and magnetic field perturbations along parallels, or also with perturbations along meridians, combined in the radial components of vorticity and electric current. In both cases the same second-order Alfven wave equation is obtained; it has, in general, two singularities. If the mean flow velocity is taken to be a power of radial distance, with exponent other than zero or unity, there is a transition layer. In general there is a second singularity, viz., a critical layer, where the Alfven speed equals the mean flow velocity. There is one exceptional case in which the critical layer does not exist, namely a homogeneous medium, for which the mean flow velocity decays on the inverse square of the radial distance, and then Alfven speed also decays in the same way, so that their ratio is a constant, leading to two possibilities: (i) the ratio is not unity, and the wave equation remains of the second-order; (ii) the wave equation becomes of first-order in the case the mean flow velocity and Alfven speed are equal everywhere, because then the waves can propagate only in one direction. Case (i) corresponds to Alfven waves in the solar breeze. Exact solutions of the wave equations are obtained for all values of the radius, as a single expression for the first-order wave equation, whereas for the second-order wave equation it is possible to obtain solutions for small and large radius; the transition level limits the radius of convergence of one of these solutions, but the two solutions together cover the full range of radial distances. The choices of boundary conditions are discussed and the wavefields plotted vs dimensionless distance for several values of the two dimensionless parameters of the problem, viz., the Alfven number and dimensionless frequency, which appear in one combination only. The analytical results of the present paper are compared with the mostly numerical results in the literature. It is shown that the Alfven waves exhibit some properties observed in the solar wind, like the nonequipartition of kinetic and magnetic energies. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.