Discovering Dual-Origin Slow Wind from Solar Orbiter with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning
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 cu...
| Authors | Henry Han, Jorge Yero Salazar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | astro-ph.SR |
| Published | 22 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 August 2026 |
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