Research Article

Impact of solar magnetic field amplitude and geometry on cosmic rays diffusion coefficients in the inner heliosphere

¹ Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Institut d’astrophysique spatiale, 91405 Orsay, France
² AIM, CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
³ IRAP, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, CNES, 14 Avenue Edouard Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France

^* Corresponding author: barbara.perri@ias.u-psud.fr

Received: 25 March 2020
Accepted: 2 October 2020

Abstract

Cosmic rays are remarkable tracers of solar events when they are associated with solar flares, but also galactic events such as supernova remnants when they come from outside our solar system. Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) are correlated with the 11-year solar cycle while Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) are anti-correlated due to their interaction with the heliospheric magnetic field and the solar wind. Our aim is to quantify separately the impact of the amplitude and the geometry of the magnetic field, both evolving during the solar cycle, on the propagation of cosmic rays of various energies in the inner heliosphere (within Earth orbit). We focus especially on the diffusion caused by the magnetic field along and across the field lines. To do so, we use the results of 3D magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) wind simulations running from the lower corona up to 1 AU. This gives us the structure of the wind and the corresponding magnetic field. The wind is modeled using a polytropic approximation, and fits and power laws are used to account for the turbulence. Using these results, we compute the parallel and perpendicular diffusion coefficients of the Parker cosmic ray transport equation, yielding 3D maps of the diffusion of cosmic rays in the inner heliosphere. By varying the amplitude of the magnetic field, we change the amplitude of the diffusion by the same factor, and the radial gradients by changing the spread of the current sheet. By varying the geometry of the magnetic field, we change the latitudinal gradients of diffusion by changing the position of the current sheets. By varying the energy, we show that the distribution of values for SEPs is more peaked than GCRs. For realistic solar configurations, we show that diffusion is highly non-axisymmetric due to the configuration of the current sheets, and that the distribution varies a lot with the distance to the Sun with a drift of the peak value. This study shows that numerical simulations, combined with theory, can help quantify better the influence of the various magnetic field parameters on the propagation of cosmic rays. This study is a first step towards the resolution of the complete Parker transport equation to generate synthetic cosmic rays rates from numerical simulations.