Wave generation in the terrestrial magnetosphere

✍ Scribed by D. J. Southwood

• Book ID: 104652191
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 791 KB
• Volume: 34
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-6308
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00175282

✦ Synopsis

The Earth's magnetosphere supports a large variety of plasma wave phenomena covering nine decades of frequency from 10 3 Hz to 10 -3 Hz. Understanding why waves occur when and where they do involves sorting out the subtle interplay between the background macroscopic features of the system, the geometry, the large scale flow, etc., and the microphysics of the plasma populations that take part. The convection induced by the solar wind produces pathological plasma phase space distributions because collisions are unimportant. Such distributions may have steep spatial gradients, inverted energy distributions or strong pitch angle anisotropy, any of which can act as a free energy source for plasma waves. Large currents along the magnetic field transmit stresses between magnetosphere and ionosphere. If the electrons carrying such currents have high enough drift velocity, waves are generated. We review several very different examples of magnetospheric wave generation.