Discovering Dual-Origin Slow Wind from Solar Orbiter with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

📅 2026-08-22
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🤖 AI Summary
该研究使用自监督对比学习方法,通过Solar-CDC框架区分太阳慢速风的双起源问题。
📝 Abstract
Whether the slow solar wind originates from one coronal source or two distinct channels remains a central open question in heliophysics. Resolving this requires unsupervised separation of two populations that arrive at nearly the same bulk speed and differ mainly in heavy-ion composition. We present Solar-CDC, a self-supervised contrastive deep clustering (CDC) framework that maps plasma observables to a latent space via a Transformer encoder, optimizes a triplet margin loss, and updates pseudo-labels via $k$-means. Theoretically, we prove that neighborhood-preserving embeddings such as t-SNE and UMAP are fundamentally constrained. Preserving the neighbor graph leaves the cross-cluster cut fraction unchanged, and preserving all but a fraction $\varepsilon$ of its links moves that fraction by at most $\varepsilon$. Neither bound depends on the target dimension. A margin objective rewrites the graph and drives the cut fraction to zero. Empirically, on 30,602 Solar Orbiter observations, thirty combinations of dimensionality reduction and clustering peak at a silhouette of $0.454$, whereas Solar-CDC reaches $0.869$. Escaping the geometric bound alone does not guarantee physical validity: TriMap also optimizes triplets and reaches $0.824$, yet its clusters score below chance against the published composition taxonomy. Solar-CDC instead recovers clusters with mean charge-state ratios of $0.080$, $0.160$, and $0.400$, placing the intermediate population inside the window associated with coronal-hole boundaries. Even when the defining charge-state ratio is withheld from the inputs entirely, the model still recovers the taxonomy defined on it. Solar-CDC thus connects self-supervised representation learning to coronal source diagnostics. Importantly, a learning loss recovers physical populations only when driven by dynamically updated physically-aware clusters rather than distances.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

slow solar wind
coronal source
unsupervised separation
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Self-supervised Contrastive Deep Clustering
Transformer Encoder
Triplet Margin Loss
k-means Pseudo-Labeling
Solar Wind Source Diagnostics
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H
Henry Han
Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, One Bear Place, Waco, TX 76798, USA
J
Jorge Yero Salazar
Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, One Bear Place, Waco, TX 76798, USA