Modelling injection rates of PUIs from photoionization using kinetic simulations of interstellar neutrals traversing the heliosphere

Recent studies of the inflow direction of the local insterstellar medium from PUI density distributions have shown that the extrema of the longitudinal distribution of PUI velocities (with respect to the solar wind speed) can be attributed to the radial velocity of the interstellar neutral seed population and is symmetric around the inflow direction of the local interstellar medium. This work is aimed to model pickup ion injection rates from photoionization (which is the main process of interstellar PUI production) throughout the heliosphere. To that end a seed population of interstellar neutrals is injected into a model heliosphere at 60 AU distance from the sun, whereas each particle's initial speed is given by a maxwellian distribution at a temperature of 1 eV and an inflow speed of 22 km/s. Then the density of the interstellar neutrals is integrated over the model heliosphere, while the movement of the neutrals is simulated using timestep methods. To model the focusing of the interstellar neutral trajectories from the sun's gravitational potential the model heliosphere contains a central gravitational potential.Each neutral test particle can be ionized via photoionization with a per-timestep probability antiproportional to the neutral's distance to the sun squared. By tracking the ionization rate location-dependently, PUI injection rates have been determined. Therefore using these simulations the density distributions of different species of interstellar neutrals have been calculated. In addition location-dependent injection rates of different species of PUIs have been calculated, which show an increased rate of PUI production in the focusing cone region (e.g. for He+ PUIs), but also in the crescent region (e.g. for O+ PUIs).Furthermore the longitudinal distribution of the neutrals' velocity at 1 AU is calculated from the simulation's results in order to estimate the PUI cut-off as a function of ecliptic longitude. Figure: Simulated He neutral density (left) and simulated He PUI production rates from photoionization (right). The sun is located at 0 AU at both x-and y-axes.