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Effect of a Converging Flow at the Streamer Cusp on the Genesis of the Slow Solar Wind

The observation by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory of blobs of plasma generated near the cusp region of the streamer belt has sparked the hope of gaining new insight into the genesis of the slow solar wind. The observations suggest that open and closed field lines reconnect near the cusp of the helmet streamer to form blobs of higher density plasmas that are ejected into the slow solar wind. Models of this process have been suggested, and simulation studies have been conducted. We take the recent simulation work of Einaudi et al. as our starting point to investigate the formation of the slow solar wind and of the blobs observed by LASCO. We report two main conclusions. First, our results confirm the overall scenario suggested in the above paper (Einaudi et al.), which is that reconnection indeed causes the formation of blobs and the acceleration of the slow solar wind. Second, by employing more realistic two-dimensional configurations including the cusp and bent field lines with fast solar wind flow, we find that reconnection giving rise to plasma blobs is driven by converging flows with reconnection rates largely insensitive to changes in resistivity.