Can Field-aligned Propagation Satisfy the Propagation Requirement of Index of Refraction?

Physics

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2700 Magnetospheric Physics, 2730 Magnetosphere: Inner, 2768 Plasmasphere, 2794 Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

The radio plasma imager (RPI) on the IMAGE satellite actively sounds the magnetosphere, measuring time delays of the returning echoes for a sequence of sounding frequencies. When the satellite is located in the plasmasphere the measurements generally show two distinct echo traces with the same polarization (identified as the X-mode). One of the traces is returned from the closer hemisphere and the other from the conjugate hemisphere. Assuming that the waves propagate along the magnetic field line, Reinisch et al. (GRL, 4521, 2001) showed that the plasma density distribution along the field could be inverted from some echo traces. The inverted density distribution can be used to predict other traces observed. A critical assumption made in the inversion technique is the exact parallel propagation. The propagation direction of a wave in space depends on the spatial variations of the index of refraction, which cannot be determined by a single line of measurements. We use the inversion technique to a time sequence of RPI measurements during a single pass; each complete measurement represents a density profile along a field line. The series of line profiles provides a 2-dimensional distribution. Based on this distribution, we derive an empirical model that best fits the measurements while satisfying the propagation requirement from the changes in the index of the refraction. The deduced function, varying with radial distance and magnetic latitude, describes this plasma density distribution with only a small number of parameters. The six profiles are fitted with a simplified version of this function and the results are discussed.

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