Ion pickup and velocity space thermalization at outer planet moons
Abstract
Ion pickup at the outer planets' active moons is a fundamental plasma process in which newly ionized particles from moon exospheres interact with the ambient corotating plasma and are accelerated to match the background flow. Spacecraft observations have revealed intense electromagnetic wave activity commonly attributed to this pickup process. Here we investigate ion pickup using hybrid-kinetic simulations in which ions are treated kinetically while electrons are modeled as a massless fluid. In the moon's rest frame, ambient ions initially stream perpendicular to the background magnetic field at the corotation velocity, creating a nongyrotropic velocity distribution with two ion populations clustered at opposite gyrophases. Within a few ion gyroperiods, this configuration simultaneously excites transverse magnetic perturbations associated with electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves and compressional perturbations associated with mirror-mode and ion Bernstein waves, reaching amplitudes of several percent of the background field strength. Using field-particle correlation analysis, we quantify the energy transfer between waves and particles and demonstrate how these perturbations scatter ions in velocity space, efficiently incorporating newly created ions into the background plasma and leading to isotropization in both gyrophase and pitch angle. These results provide a kinetic framework for understanding pickup-driven wave-particle interactions and offer guidance for interpreting in situ measurements at active moons throughout the outer solar system.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.10083,
title = {Ion pickup and velocity space thermalization at outer planet moons},
author = {Xin An and Miranda Chang and Hao Cao and Vassilis Angelopoulos and Anton Artemyev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10083},
year = {2026}
}