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The fast transit-time limit of magnetic pumping with trapped electrons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2021

J. Egedal*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1150 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA
E. Lichko
Affiliation:
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, 1629 E University Boulevard, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
*
Email address for correspondence: egedal@wisc.edu
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Abstract

Recently, the energization of superthermal electrons at the Earth's bow shock was found to be consistent with a new magnetic pumping model derived in the limit where the electron transit time is much shorter than any time scale governing the evolution of the magnetic fields. The new model breaks with the common approach of integrating the kinetic equations along unperturbed orbits. Rather, the fast transit-time limit allows the electron dynamics to be characterized by adiabatic invariants (action variables) accurately capturing the nonlinear effects of electrons becoming trapped in magnetic perturbations. Without trapping, fast parallel streaming along magnetic field lines causes the electron pressure to be isotropized and homogeneous along the magnetic field lines. In contrast, trapping permits spatially varying pressure anisotropy to form along the magnetic field lines, and through a Fermi process this pressure anisotropy in turn becomes the main ingredient that renders magnetic pumping efficient for energizing superthermal electrons. We here present a detailed mathematical derivation of the model.

Keywords

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. A trapped (green) and a passing (black) electron orbit within a compressional magnetic perturbation.

Figure 1

Figure 2. (a) The function $j(\varLambda )$ in (2.6) plotted as a function of $\varLambda$ and evaluated for three separate values of ${\tilde {B}}_m$. (b) The relative particle energization $v^2/v_0^2=1/(j^2+\varLambda )$. (c,d) Examples of local electron distributions predicted by (2.5) both computed for $B_m/B_0=1.5$, and a Maxwellian $f_0$ with thermal speed $v_t=1$. In (c) the local position is at the point of minimum field strength, $B/B_0=0.5$, whereas $B/B_0=1.25$ for the distribution in (d).

Figure 2

Figure 3. Solid lines show predictions for ${\mathcal {G}}$ calculated with $\Delta B/B_0 \in \{0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9\}$, and including the first one, two and five finite terms of the sum in (6.26). For comparison, the red crosses are obtained by numerical integration of (4.7), using equation (7) of Lichko & Egedal (2020) to estimate ${\mathcal {G}}$.