Construction of Solar-Wind-Like Magnetic Fields

Fluctuations in the solar wind fields tend to not only have velocities and magnetic fields correlated in the sense consistent with Alfvén waves traveling from the Sun, but they also have the magnitude of the magnetic field remarkably constant despite their being broadband. This Letter provides, for the first time, a method for constructing fields with nearly constant magnetic field, zero divergence, and with any specified power spectrum for the fluctuations of the components of the field. Every wave vector, k, is associated with two polarizations; the relative phases of these can be chosen to minimize the variance of the field magnitude while retaining the “random” character of the fields. The method is applied to a case with one spatial coordinate that demonstrates good agreement with observed time series and power spectra of the magnetic field in the solar wind, as well as with the distribution of the angles of rapid changes (“discontinuities”), thus showing a deep connection between two seemingly unrelated issues. It is suggested that using this construction will lead to more realistic simulations of solar wind turbulence and of the propagation of energetic particles.