Ion Thermalization and Wave Excitation Downstream of Earth's Bow Shock: Cluster Data

Details Ion Thermalization and Wave Excitation Downstream of Earth's Bow Shock: Cluster Data Ion Thermalization and Wave Excitation Downstream of Earth's Bow Shock: Cluster Data

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufmsh53a1249l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #SH53A-1249

Physics

7829 Kinetic Waves And Instabilities, 7851 Shock Waves (4455), 7867 Wave/Particle Interactions (2483, 6984)

Scientific paper

Thermalization of solar wind ions downstream of Earth's bow shock has been intensively investigated in the past with single spacecraft missions. However, temporal and spatial scales could not be determined. Cluster with its multi-spacecraft capabilities allows us to determine these quantities directly. We have used ion data from the ion composition instrument CIS and magnetic field data from the fluxgate magnetometer to investigate thermalization downstream of the quasi-perpendicular Earth's bow shock. We selected marginally supercritical shock crossings and determined thermalization time and length scales. The results show that part of the thermal energy, especially the portion of the thermal energy residing in motion perpendicular to the average magnetic field is converted into ion-cyclotron waves. The time scale for this process depends on the plasma environment downstream of the shock. To measure the distances of the spacecraft to the shock we use the method presented in Maksimovic et al. (2003). The resulting time scale shows good agreement with the prediction of quasilinear theory.

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