Heating of Heavy Ions by Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection Driven Collisionless Shocks

Shock heating and particle acceleration processes are some of the mostfundamental physical phenomena of plasma physics with countless applications inlaboratory physics, space physics, and astrophysics. This study is motivated byprevious observations of non-thermal heating of heavy ions in astrophysicalshocks (Korreck et al. 2004). Here, we focus on shocks driven by InterplanetaryCoronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs) which heat the solar wind and accelerateparticles. This study focuses specifically on the heating of heavy ions causedby these shocks. Previous studies have focused only on the two dynamicallydominant species, H+ and He2+ . This study utilizes thermal properties measuredby the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) aboard the AdvancedComposition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft to examine heavy ion heating. Thisinstrument provides data for many heavy ions not previously available fordetailed study, such as Oxygen (O6+, O7+), Carbon (C5+, C6+), and Iron (Fe10+).The ion heating is found to depend critically on the upstream plasmaComment: accepted Ap