Research Highlights

The physical mechanisms behind accelerating solar and stellar winds are a long-standing astrophysical mystery, although recent breakthroughs have come from models invoking the turbulent dissipation of Alfvén waves. The existence of Alfvén waves far from the Sun has been known since the 1970s, and recently the presence of ubiquitous Alfvénic waves throughout the solar atmosphere has been confirmed.

However, we still do not know much about the nature of these Alfvénic waves in the low corona - including how they are excited and what are their typical properties. My work explores solar magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) waves and the role they play in determining the dynamics of the Sun's atmosphere. I am interested in how the waves are generated and what happens to them as they propagate through the solar atmosphere. Hopefully the research will answer questions about the role of Alfvénic waves play in the heating of the solar atmosphere and solar wind acceleration.

Some recent key papers of mine on the subject are:

• A basal contribution from p-modes to the Alfvénic wave flux in the Sun's corona (Nature Astonomy, 3, 223 2019)

• Investigating Alfvénic wave propagation in coronal open-field regions (Nature Comms. 6 7813, 2015)

• A Global View of Velocity Fluctuations in the Corona below 1.3 R ⊙ with CoMP (Astrophysical Journal 828 89, 2016)

• First Direct Measurements of Transverse Waves in Solar Polar Plumes Using SDO/AIA (Astrophysical Journal 790 105, 2014)

The movie below shows swaying columns of plasma that outline the magnetic field - this motion indicates the presence of Alfvénic waves.