Speaker
Description
The heat flux in the solar wind is a fundamental mechanism for understanding the expansion, thermal pressure gradient, and global thermodynamics of interplanetary plasma. Due to the weakly collisional nature of this medium, electrons organize themselves into distinct populations (core, halo, and strahl), with suprathermal electrons being the main conductors of thermal energy along the magnetic field lines. Whistler-mode waves play a crucial regulatory role: through wave-particle interactions, they promote pitch-angle scattering of these suprathermal electrons, limiting the free conduction of heat flow and coordinating the macroscopic evolution of the plasma. The objective of this work lies in the calculation of the heat flux mediated by whistler waves, adopting an analytical approach of the Kappa velocity distribution function (VDF). The use of the Kappa distribution is necessary because classical Maxwellian distributions fail to capture the quasi-equilibrium states and high-energy tails that characterize electrons in the solar wind. This development overcomes limitations and noise inherent in strictly numerical approximations, providing a detailed basis for evaluating the growth rates of electron-driven instabilities. This approach offers the necessary support for interpreting and validating the complex in-situ measurements of particle distributions performed by contemporary space missions.