Observations and simulations of non-local acceleration of electrons in magnetotail magnetic reconnection events

By M. Ashour‐Abdalla, M. El‐Alaoui, M. Goldstein, Meng Zhou, D. Schriver, R. Richard, R. Walker, M. Kivelson, K. Hwang. 2011

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic reconnection in magnetized plasmas represents a change in magnetic field topology and is associated with a concomitant energization of charged particles that results from a conversion of magnetic energy into particle energy. In Earth’s magnetosphere this process is associated with the entry of the solar wind into the magnetosphere and with the initiation of auroral substorms. Using data from the THEMIS mission, together with global and test particle simulations, we demonstrate that electrons are energized in two distinct regions: a low-energy population (less than or equal to a few kiloelectronvolts) that arises in a diffusion region where particles are demagnetized and the magnetic topology changes, and a high-energy component (approaching 100 keV) that results from betatron acceleration within dipolarization fronts that sweep towards the inner magnetosphere far from the diffusion region. Thus, the observed particle energization is associated with both magnetic reconnection and with betatron acceleration associated with macroscopic flows.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb20e8e7eef165adb77af1bdd859ebc1fbabb878

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Birn
2. L. Zelenyi
3. D. N. Baker
4. M. Echim
5. Anton V. Artemyev
6. Masahiro Hoshino
7. Y. Lyubarsky

Citations in the corpus

• Particle Acceleration in the Magnetotail and Aurora (2012, methodology): “…plasmoids (e.g., Zong et al. 2004 and references therein) and dipolarization fronts (e.g., Runov et al. 2009 and references therein) may produce large scale inductive electric fields, which can become an effective tool for particle acceleration (Birn et al. 2004b; Ashour-Abdalla et al. 2011).”