Instabilities Driven by the Drift and Temperature Anisotropy of Alpha Particles in the Solar Wind

We investigate the conditions under which parallel-propagating Alfvén/ion-cyclotron (A/IC) waves and fast-magnetosonic/whistler (FM/W) waves are driven unstable by the differential flow and temperature anisotropy of alpha particles in the solar wind. We focus on the limit in which $w_{\parallel α} \gtrsim 0.25 v_{\mathrm A}$, where $w_{\parallel α}$ is the parallel alpha-particle thermal speed and $v_{\mathrm A}$ is the Alfvén speed. We derive analytic expressions for the instability thresholds of these waves, which show, e.g., how the minimum unstable alpha-particle beam speed depends upon $w_{\parallel α}/v_{\mathrm A}$, the degree of alpha-particle temperature anisotropy, and the alpha-to-proton temperature ratio. We validate our analytical results using numerical solutions to the full hot-plasma dispersion relation. Consistent with previous work, we find that temperature anisotropy allows A/IC waves and FM/W waves to become unstable at significantly lower values of the alpha-particle beam speed $U_α$ than in the isotropic-temperature case. Likewise, differential flow lowers the minimum temperature anisotropy needed to excite A/IC or FM/W waves relative to the case in which $U_α=0$. We discuss the relevance of our results to alpha particles in the solar wind near 1 AU.

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