Solar wind Solar wind The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona. This plasma consists of mostly electrons, protons and alpha particles with kinetic energy between 0.5 and 10 keV. Embedded within the solar-wind plasma is the interplanetary magnetic field. The solar wind varies in density, temperature and speed over time and over solar latitude and longitude. Its particles can escape the Sun's gravity because of their high energy resulting from the high temperature of the corona, which in turn is a result of the coronal magnetic field. At a
Two-stream instability in various limiting cases as beam-plasma instability, beam instability, or bump-on-tail instability. Consider a cold, uniform, and unmagnetized plasma, where ions are stationary and the electrons have velocity formula_1, that is, the reference frame is moving with the ion stream. Let the electrostatic waves be of the form: formula_2 Applying linearization techniques to the equation of motions for both species, to the equation of continuity, and Poisson's equation, and introducing the spatial and temporal harmonic operators formula_3, formula_4 we can get the following expression: formula_5 which represents the dispersion relation for longitudinal waves, and represents a quartic equation in formula_6.