Formation of electron radiation belts at Saturn by Z-mode wave acceleration

E. E. Woodfield (), R. B. Horne, S. A. Glauert, J. D. Menietti, Y. Y. Shprits and W. S. Kurth
Additional contact information
E. E. Woodfield: British Antarctic Survey
R. B. Horne: British Antarctic Survey
S. A. Glauert: British Antarctic Survey
J. D. Menietti: University of Iowa
Y. Y. Shprits: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
W. S. Kurth: University of Iowa

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract At Saturn electrons are trapped in the planet’s magnetic field and accelerated to relativistic energies to form the radiation belts, but how this dramatic increase in electron energy occurs is still unknown. Until now the mechanism of radial diffusion has been assumed but we show here that in-situ acceleration through wave particle interactions, which initial studies dismissed as ineffectual at Saturn, is in fact a vital part of the energetic particle dynamics there. We present evidence from numerical simulations based on Cassini spacecraft data that a particular plasma wave, known as Z-mode, accelerates electrons to MeV energies inside 4 RS (1 RS = 60,330 km) through a Doppler shifted cyclotron resonant interaction. Our results show that the Z-mode waves observed are not oblique as previously assumed and are much better accelerators than O-mode waves, resulting in an electron energy spectrum that closely approaches observed values without any transport effects included.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07549-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-07549-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07549-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().