On the correlation between interplanetary nano dust particles and solar wind properties from STEREO/SWAVES

Dust particles provide an important fraction of the matter composing the interplanetary medium, their mass density at 1 AU being comparable to the one of the solar wind. Among them, dusts of nanometer size-scale can be detected using radio and plasma waves instruments because they move at roughly the solar wind speed. The high velocity impact of a dust particle generates a small crater on the spacecraft: the dust particle and the crater material are vaporized. This produces a plasma cloud whose associated electrical charge induces an electric pulse measured with radio and plasma instruments. Since their first detection in the interplanetary medium (Meyer-Vernet et al. 2009), nanodusts have been routinely measured using STEREO/WAVES instrument (Zaslavsky et al. 2012) We present the nanodust properties during the 2007-2012 period on STEREO. Since the maximum size of the plasma cloud is larger for smaller local solar wind density, we expect to observe an anticorrelation between the detected voltage amplitude and the ambient solar wind density, as suggested recently by Le Chat et al. (2012). Moreover, the variations in solar wind speed and magnetic field are expected to affect the nano dust dynamics. Using STEREO/WAVES/Low Frequency Receiver (LFR) data, we study correlations of in situ solar wind properties and detection of nanodust impacts as well as some possible effects of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) on nanodusts acceleration.