Search Publications
Regarding the relativistic electron dynamics in the outer radiation belt: a historical view
Stepanova, Marina; Pinto, Victor; Antonova, Elizaveta
The start of the space era marked the discovery of the Earth's radiation belts. Sixty-five years after that discovery, there are still many unknowns in its dynamics, but there is also a lot of understanding about many processes. This review summarizes a broad overview of a particular topic: the effect of geomagnetic storms on the radiation belts f…
Kinetic Alfven wave (KAW) eigenmode in magnetosphere magnetic reconnection
Wang, Chi; Dai, Lei
One prominent signature of collisionless magnetic reconnection in the magnetosphere is the Hall effect. In the ion-scale region of reconnection, ions cannot follow the magnetic field line whereas electrons are still magnetized. The difference in the motions of electrons and ions leads to charge separation, the resulting transverse Hall electric fi…
Recent progress on magnetic reconnection by in situ measurements
Lu, Quanming; Wang, Rongsheng; Lu, San +2 more
In the last decades, a few spacecraft missions have been launched to investigate the process of magnetic reconnection in space, during which magnetic free energy is explosively released into plasma kinetic energy and heating. Due to the sophisticated in situ measurements of the spacecraft missions, a big progress has been achieved over the last de…
Electric fields and currents in solar-terrestrial plasmas
Yang, Zhongwei; Parks, George K.; Lee, Ensang
This article will review many ideas and concepts originally suggested by Alfvén (Space Sci Rev 7:1940, 1967) and Fälthammar (Rev Geophys 15: 457, 1977) on the important roles electric fields and currents play in solar-terrestrial plasmas. Much of our understanding of planetary and solar plasmas has come primarily from treating plasmas as fluids. F…
Nonlinear dynamics in space plasma turbulence: temporal stochastic chaos
Chian, A. C. -L.; Miranda, R. A.; Hada, T. +3 more
Intermittent turbulence is key for understanding the stochastic nonlinear dynamics of space, astrophysical, and laboratory plasmas. We review the theory of deterministic and stochastic temporal chaos in plasmas and discuss its link to intermittent turbulence observed in space plasmas. First, we discuss the theory of chaos, intermittency, and compl…
Kinetic properties of collisionless magnetic reconnection in space plasma: in situ observations
Zhou, Meng; Deng, Xiaohua; Zhong, Zhihong
In collisionless plasmas, magnetic reconnection is widely recognized as one of the most important energy conversion and dissipation processes. Although reconnection is usually manifested as macroscopic effects, such as large-scale magnetic topology change and fast plasma flows, kinetic physics is the underlying process driving these macroscopic ph…
Kinetic Alfvén waves in the magnetotail during substorms
Wang, Chi; Dai, Lei; Duan, Suping
Kinetic Alfvén waves (KAWs) are low-frequency dispersive Alfvén waves with a small perpendicular wavelength and long parallel wavelength to the ambient magnetic field direction. KAWs carry the parallel electric field with a large perpendicular wave vector angle to the ambient magnetic field. It is well known that KAWs play a significant role in th…
Magnetohydrodynamic and kinetic scale turbulence in the near-Earth space plasmas: a (short) biased review
Sahraoui, Fouad; Huang, Shiyong; Hadid, Lina
The near-Earth space is a unique laboratory to explore turbulence and energy dissipation processes in magnetized plasmas thanks to the availability of high-quality data from various orbiting spacecraft, such as Wind, Stereo, Cluster, Themis, and the more recent one, the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. In comparison with the solar win…
The interaction of ultra-low-frequency pc3-5 waves with charged particles in Earth's magnetosphere
Zong, Qiugang; Rankin, Robert; Zhou, Xuzhi
One of the most important issues in space physics is to identify the dominant processes that transfer energy from the solar wind to energetic particle populations in Earth's inner magnetosphere. Ultra-low-frequency (ULF) waves are an important consideration as they propagate electromagnetic energy over vast distances with little dissipation and in…
Shocks in collisionless plasmas
Liu, Y.; Parks, G. K.; Fu, S. Y. +3 more
The Earth's bow shock is the best-known collisionless shock in space. Although much is known about the bow shock, the mechanisms of heating and thermalization processes still remain poorly understood. Collisionless shocks are different from ordinary fluid shocks, because a fraction of the incident solar wind is reflected from the bow shock and the…