IMPACTOFPICKUPIONSONTHESHOCKFRONT.PDFVIP

The Astrophysical Journal, 809:28 (9pp), 2015 August 10 doi:10.1088/0004-637X/809/1/28 © 2015. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. IMPACT OF PICKUP IONS ON THE SHOCK FRONT NONSTATIONARITY AND ENERGY DISSIPATION OF THE HELIOSPHERIC TERMINATION SHOCK: TWO-DIMENSIONAL FULL PARTICLE SIMULATIONS AND COMPARISON WITH VOYAGER 2 OBSERVATIONS 1 1 2 3 3 1 Zhongwei Yang , Ying D. Liu , John D. Richardson , Quanming Lu , Can Huang , and Rui Wang 1 State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; liuxying@spaceweather.ac.cn 2 Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA 3 CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment, Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China Received 2015 April 22; accepted 2015 June 27; published 2015 August 5 ABSTRACT Voyager 2 (V2) observed multiple crossings of the heliospheric termination shock (TS) on 2007 August 31– September 1 at a distance of 84 AU from the Sun. Here, for the first time, we present two-dimensional particle-in- cell (PIC) simulations of the TS self-consistently including pickup ions (PUIs), and compare the simulation results with V2 observations. We find that (1) PUIs play a key role in the energy dissipation of the TS, and most of the incident ion kinetic energy is transferred to the thermal energy of PUIs. The