Centrifugal acceleration of ions near Mercury

Details Centrifugal acceleration of ions near Mercury Centrifugal acceleration of ions near Mercury

Jun 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002georl..29l..32d&link_type=abstract

Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 29, Issue 12, pp. 32-1, CiteID 1591, DOI 10.1029/2001GL013829

Physics

Plasma Physics

11

Planetology: Solar System Objects: Mercury, Magnetospheric Physics: Planetary Magnetospheres (5443, 5737, 6030), Magnetospheric Physics: Numerical Modeling, Space Plasma Physics: Charged Particle Motion And Acceleration

Scientific paper

We investigate the parallel acceleration of ions inside Mercury's magnetosphere. We focus on centrifugal effects associated with the large scale plasma convection. We demonstrate that, because curvature radii of the E × B drift paths are much smaller at Mercury than at Earth, centrifugal effects are enhanced and lead to prominent parallel energization during transport from high to low latitudes. For moderate convection rates, model trajectory calculations reveal that these E × B related centrifugal effects yield energization of heavy ions sputtered from Mercury's surface (e.g., Na+) of several tens or a few hundreds of eV within minutes. This suggests that, at Mercury, material of planetary origin is rapidly raised up to plasma sheet energies. Such a situation contrasts with that prevailing at Earth where these centrifugal effects are relatively weak, yielding energization of ionosphere originating ions of at most a few tens of eV on the time scale of hours.

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