- 1Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian, High Energy Astrophysics (HEA) Division, Cambridge, United States of America (srijanbdas@alumni.princeton.edu)
- 2NASA-GSFC
Strong perpendicular diffusion of the beam in ion VDFs have been detected in the solar wind using Parker Solar Probe's SPAN-i instrument and have been termed as the hammerhead distribution functions. There have been ongoing studies trying to simulate the formation of these hammerhead features, which have met with muted success. It has been hypothesized that these perpendicular scattering of ions can be attributed to resonant scattering of beam ions by parallel-propagating, right circularly polarized, fast magnetosonic/whistler waves (Verniero et al 2022). However, in order to extract definitive physical explanations and stipulate their occurrence rate as a function of plasma beta, closeness to the heliospheric current sheet and distance from change in magnetic topology, a statistical study and characterization is necessary of these hammerhead occurrences. In our study, we develop a super-fast Python-based repository to filter-out the hammerheads across all PSP data where the VDF is dominantly in the field-of-view of SPAN-i. Immediate future goals involve characterizing these hammerhead VDFs using more sophisticated fitting algorithms (sidestepping the bi-Maxwellian fits) to characterize various features of the distributions such as the distance between core and hammerhead, ratio of the parallel and perpendicular temperatures of the core and hammerhead, and other crucial features
How to cite: Das, S. B. and Verniero, J.: Hunting for hammerheads occurances using hammerhead finder software hampy, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-15609, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15609, 2025.