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Electron Bulk Acceleration and Thermalization at Earth’s Quasiperpendicular Bow Shock [Electron Acceleration and Thermalization at Earth's Quasi-Perpendicular Bow Shock]

Journal Article · · Physical Review Letters
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  1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States); Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
  2. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  3. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
  4. Univ. of Bergen, Bergen (Norway)
  5. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)
  6. Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX (United States)
  7. Denali Scientific, Healy, AK (United States)
  8. Univ. de Toulouse (UPS), Toulouse (France)
  9. CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/Sorbonne Univ./Univ. Paris Sud/Observatoire de Paris, Palaiseau Cedex (France)
  10. Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala (Sweden)
  11. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden)
  12. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
Electron heating at Earth’s quasiperpendicular bow shock has been surmised to be due to the combined effects of a quasistatic electric potential and scattering through wave-particle interaction. Here we report the observation of electron distribution functions indicating a new electron heating process occurring at the leading edge of the shock front. Incident solar wind electrons are accelerated parallel to the magnetic field toward downstream, reaching an electron-ion relative drift speed exceeding the electron thermal speed. The bulk acceleration is associated with an electric field pulse embedded in a whistler-mode wave. The high electron-ion relative drift is relaxed primarily through a nonlinear current-driven instability. Here, the relaxed distributions contain a beam traveling toward the shock as a remnant of the accelerated electrons. Similar distribution functions prevail throughout the shock transition layer, suggesting that the observed acceleration and thermalization is essential to the cross-shock electron heating.
Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
LDRD; USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396; SC0016278
OSTI ID:
1477703
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1439741
Report Number(s):
LA-UR--18-26991
Journal Information:
Physical Review Letters, Journal Name: Physical Review Letters Journal Issue: 22 Vol. 120; ISSN 0031-9007; ISSN PRLTAO
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (4)

High-Resolution Measurements of the Cross-Shock Potential, Ion Reflection, and Electron Heating at an Interplanetary Shock by MMS journal June 2019
Linear unstable whistler eigenmodes excited by a finite electron beam journal August 2019
Decomposition of plasma kinetic entropy into position and velocity space and the use of kinetic entropy in particle-in-cell simulations journal August 2019
Linear unstable whistler eigenmodes excited by a finite electron beam text January 2019

Figures / Tables (4)

Figure 1(p. 15)figure Figure 1
Figure 2(p. 16)figure Figure 2
Figure 3(p. 17)figure Figure 3
Figure 4(p. 18)figure Figure 4

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