Solar Chromospheric Heating by Kinetic Alfvén Waves Based on the Three-fluid Model

The heating mechanism of the solar chromosphere with a partially ionized plasma has been one of the challenging problems in solar physics. Kinetic Alfvén waves (KAWs) have been applied by many authors to study the heating of the corona and chromosphere because of their small-scale dispersion characteristics and hence high efficiency in plasma heating. The theory of KAWs is usually based on a fully ionized plasma physics, which, in general, is not valid for partially ionized plasmas such as in the chromosphere. In this paper, employing the three-fluid model of partially ionized plasmas, we study the ohmic dissipation of KAWs due to the classical particle collision in the chromosphere and discuss its possible role in chromospheric heating. The results show that KAW heating can effectively compensate for the radiation energy loss of the upper chromosphere, and the two-fluid plasma model especially is still a good approximation for describing the ohmic dissipation of KAWs in partially ionized plasmas with ionization higher than 10 −3 , such as in the upper chromosphere.