Probing Solar Wind Turbulence with the Jansky Very Large Array

The solar wind offers an extraordinary laboratory for studying MHD turbulence, turbulent dissipation, and heating. Radio propagation phenomena can be exploited as probes of the solar wind in regions that are generally inaccessible to in situ spacecraft measurements. Here, we have undertaken a study with the VLA to observe point-like sources drawn from the JVAS catalog, and 3 VLA calibrator sources, to trans-illuminate the outer corona/inner solar wind. In doing so, we will exploit angular broadening and refractive scintillation to deduce properties of the solar wind along ~100 lines of sight within 7 solar radii of the Sun and a wide range of position angles, a factor 10 improvement over previous studies. By fitting the complex visibilities using well-known techniques we can deduce or constrain a number of key parameters, including the spectral slope of the turbulence at both small (km to 10s of km) and large (thousands of km) scales, determine the presence and evolution of an inner scale, measure the degree of anisotropy, and constrain the topology of the global coronal magnetic field. The inner scale is of particular interest for constraining current theories of turbulence dissipation and heating.