Residual strahls in solar wind electron dropouts: Signatures of magnetic connection to the Sun, disconnection, or interchange reconnection?

A recent assessment of suprathermal electron heat flux dropouts (HFDs) in the solar wind eliminated 90% as possible signatures of field lines disconnected from the Sun at both ends (Pagel et al., 2005b). The primary reason for elimination was the presence of a residual field‐aligned strahl presumably signaling field lines connected to the Sun. Using high‐time‐resolution data from the Wind spacecraft, this paper tests whether the residual strahls were an artifact of averaging over pitch angle distributions (PADs) with and without strahls. An automated search for PADs without strahls (flat PADs) yields an occurrence rate of only 14% within HFDs, but a detailed case study shows that these flat PADs are imbedded within intervals of nearly flat PADs, that is, PADS with residual strahls that cannot be artifacts of averaging. An attractive alternative is that the residual strahls result from intermixing of originally back‐scattered fluxes (haloes) of unequal intensities on field lines that have either disconnected or interchange reconnected at the Sun. A reevaluation of reported streaming of higher‐energy electrons in HFDs suggests a similar cause. While the high‐time‐resolution data show high variability of PAD profiles within HFDs, this paper reopens the possibility that a substantial fraction signal disconnection or interchange reconnection. Estimated occurrence rates of fields having undergone these processes based upon published HFD rates are of the same order of magnitude as the surprisingly low values of ∼1–5% recently predicted by a model of a balanced heliospheric flux budget (Owens and Crooker, 2007).