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Wave acceleration of electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts

Meredith, Nigel P.; Horne, Richard B.; Glauert, Sarah A. +11 more

The Van Allen radiation belts are two regions encircling the Earth in which energetic charged particles are trapped inside the Earth's magnetic field. Their properties vary according to solar activity and they represent a hazard to satellites and humans in space. An important challenge has been to explain how the charged particles within these bel…

In situ multi-satellite detection of coherent vortices as a manifestation of Alfvénic turbulence

Sundkvist, David; Vaivads, Andris; Krasnoselskikh, Vladimir +4 more

Turbulence in fluids and plasmas is a ubiquitous phenomenon driven by a variety of sources-currents, sheared flows, gradients in density and temperature, and so on. Turbulence involves fluctuations of physical properties on many different scales, which interact nonlinearly to produce self-organized structures in the form of vortices. Vortex motion…

Magnetospheric physics: Turbulence on a small scale

Goldstein, Melvyn L.

The four-spacecraft Cluster mission has identified small-scale vortices in Earth's magnetosphere. The observation reveals processes that transfer energy and momentum from the solar wind to the magnetosphere.