Cavitating Langmuir Turbulence in the Terrestrial Aurora
Space Physics
2012-03-14 v3
Abstract
Langmuir cavitons have been artificially produced in the earth's ionosphere, but evidence of naturally-occurring cavitation has been elusive. By measuring and modeling the spectra of electrostatic plasma modes, we show that natural cavitating, or strong, Langmuir turbulence does occur in the ionosphere, via a process in which a beam of auroral electrons drives Langmuir waves, which in turn produce cascading Langmuir and ion-acoustic excitations and cavitating Langmuir turbulence. The data presented here are the first direct evidence of cavitating Langmuir turbulence occurring naturally in any space or astrophysical plasma.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1101.3517,
title = {Cavitating Langmuir Turbulence in the Terrestrial Aurora},
author = {B. Isham and M. T. Rietveld and P. Guio and F. R. E. Forme and T. Grydeland and E. Mjølhus},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.3517},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures, published in PRL on 9 March 2012 http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.105003