English

Electromagnetic waves and electron anisotropies downstream of supercritical interplanetary shocks

Space Physics 2015-06-05 v1 Plasma Physics

Abstract

We present waveform observations of electromagnetic lower hybrid and whistler waves with f_ci << f < f_ce downstream of four supercritical interplanetary (IP) shocks using the Wind search coil magnetometer. The whistler waves were observed to have a weak positive correlation between \partialB and normalized heat flux magnitude and an inverse correlation with T_eh/T_ec. All were observed simultaneous with electron distributions satisfying the whistler heat flux instability threshold and most with T_{perp,h}/T_{para,h} > 1.01. Thus, the whistler mode waves appear to be driven by a heat flux instability and cause perpendicular heating of the halo electrons. The lower hybrid waves show a much weaker correlation between \partialB and normalized heat flux magnitude and are often observed near magnetic field gradients. A third type of event shows fluctuations consistent with a mixture of both lower hybrid and whistler mode waves. These results suggest that whistler waves may indeed be regulating the electron heat flux and the halo temperature anisotropy, which is important for theories and simulations of electron distribution evolution from the sun to the earth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.6429,
  title  = {Electromagnetic waves and electron anisotropies downstream of supercritical interplanetary shocks},
  author = {L. B. Wilson and A. Koval and A. Szabo and A. Breneman and C. A. Cattell and K. Goetz and P. J. Kellogg and K. Kersten and J. C. Kasper and B. A. Maruca and M. Pulupa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.6429},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

20 pages, 3 PDF figures, submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research