A tale of two magnetospheres - the cold and the hot

Physics

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Scientific paper

The plasmasphere owes its discovery to the accidental observation of whistlers, mysterious natural VLF signals, of unknown origin at the time, by Barkhausen, in 1919. Storey in 1953 proposed the first quantitative theory of whistlers that implied a revolutionary model of the Earth's outer atmosphere, with electron density of 400el/cm3 at /L=3, completely at odds with the then accepted model of the exosphere. Mapping by D.L. Carpenter of this outer region using ``nose'' whistlers revealed a large volume of plasma whose unexpected sharply defined outer boundary, the plasmapause, was reported in /1963. With the discovery in /1958 of the radiation belts by Van Allen it was realized that there were two intermixed magnetospheres, one the thermal electrons and ions and the other the trapped energetic particles of the radiation belts. This mixture of the two magnetospheres, the ``cold'' and the ``hot'', led directly to the identification and study of a fascinating array of nonlinear interactions between energetic particles and whistler-mode waves, both natural and man-made, including exponential wave growth and wave-induced particle precipitation. The two major forefronts of current research on the plasmasphere are: (1) the static and dynamic properties of the plasmasphere, including the still unsolved problem of the removal of the outer plasmasphere during substorms, and (2) the description and modeling of the many wave-particle interactions that depend on the properties of both magnetospheres.

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