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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Space Physics
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1528501

The Effects of Plasma Source on Adiabatic Electron Acceleration at Dipolarization Fronts

Provisionally accepted
S NF Chepuri S NF Chepuri 1*Allison Jaynes Allison Jaynes 1Jayasri Joseph Jayasri Joseph 1Drew Turner Drew Turner 2Christine Gabrielse Christine Gabrielse 3Ian James Cohen Ian James Cohen 2Daniel N. Baker Daniel N. Baker 4Barry Mauk Barry Mauk 2Trevor Leonard Trevor Leonard 5J F Fennell J F Fennell 3
  • 1 The University of Iowa, Iowa City, United States
  • 2 Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Maryland, United States
  • 3 The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, California, United States
  • 4 Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States
  • 5 Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Particle acceleration is a commonly observed phenomenon at dipolarization fronts. Many studies have attempted to determine the acceleration mechanism, with betatron acceleration being a major candidate. In previous work, we attempted to match the observed change in electron energy to the change predicted by betatron acceleration, but found that although this worked in some cases, overall betatron acceleration alone could not describe the observed energy spectrum changes. In this work, we attempted to study whether ion acceleration showed similar behavior and whether a quasi-adiabatic correction would be more accurate. On average the betatron acceleration equation overestimated the observed acceleration and the quasi-adiabatic correction did not account for the difference, although there are limitations to this study due to data fidelity.We then turned to study whether our assumptions about the source population having the same phase space density as the cold pre-existing background population in the plasma sheet are valid.We indirectly studied this by comparing the relative abundances of O + and He ++ as proxies for ionospheric and solar wind populations respectively. We found the betatron acceleration equation method performs slightly better when there is a stronger ionospheric component. This suggests that when more plasma containing O + is present in the dipolarization front, it indicates that the source population is more local and therefore this method of using betatron acceleration is more valid.

    Keywords: energetic particles, dipolarization fronts, adiabatic acceleration, Betatron acceleration, MMS, Magnetotail, Ions

    Received: 14 Nov 2024; Accepted: 24 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Chepuri, Jaynes, Joseph, Turner, Gabrielse, Cohen, Baker, Mauk, Leonard and Fennell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: S NF Chepuri, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, United States

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