Acceleration of Ring Current Protons Driven by Magnetosonic Waves: Comparisons of Test Particle Simulations with Quasilinear Calculations

Abstract

Wave-particle interactions play important roles in local acceleration and pitch angle scattering loss of charged particle dynamics in astrophysics and space physics, and energy transfer between plasma waves and particles is a key problem in plasma physics. Using full relativistic test particle simulations, we quantitatively evaluate the magnetosonic wave-driven acceleration of Earth's ring current protons both inside and outside the plasmapause at L = 4.5. Analysis of resonance conditions indicates that the broadband magnetosonic waves can affect protons by multiple harmonic cyclotron resonances. With a representative amplitude ∼200 pT, magnetosonic waves can produce energy diffusion coefficients, obtained from test particle simulations, at rates of ∼10^-4 s^-1 for protons ∼1-3 keV inside the plasmapause and ∼3-30 keV outside the plasmapause, both at equatorial pitch angles ∼75°-90°. Compared with the quasilinear theory calculations, the test particle diffusion coefficients exhibit a difference due to the nonresonant transit time effect outside the plasmapause. Subsequent 2D Fokker-Planck simulations indicate that on a timescale of ∼2 days, magnetosonic waves can effectively enhance the phase space density of the ring current protons ∼10 keV inside the plasmapause and ∼100 keV outside the plasmapause at equatorial pitch angles ∼60°-90°, thereby leading to the evolvement of the ring current proton distribution from a Kappa-type to a 90°-peaked profile. Our results demonstrate that the local acceleration of the ring current protons by magnetosonic waves is an important process of energy transfer between different populations of magnetospheric protons and hence contributes to the dynamic evolution of Earth's ring current.