Relation of solar wind fluctuations to differential flow between protons and alphas

An analysis is made of the difference between the alpha particle and proton flow velocities in the solar wind as observed by the OGO 5 satellite. The alpha and proton velocities from each of 962 spectral scans are compared with the variance of 32 solar wind flux measurements made during the scans. The average velocity difference is plotted for each of 10 logarithmic variance intervals and is seen to decrease and approach zero when the variance is high. It is shown that such an anticorrelation may be due to the fact the wave/particle interactions provide the drag force between two streams of different velocity in a collisionless plasma.