Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aipc..875..308m&link_type=abstract
PLASMA AND FUSION SCIENCE: 16th IAEA Technical Meeting on Research using Small Fusion Devices; XI Latin American Workshop on Pla
Physics
Plasma Physics
Inner Magnetosphere, Outer Magnetosphere, Saturn, Corotating Streams, Energetic Particles, Particle Acceleration
Scientific paper
Voyager and Cassini plasma probe observations suggest that there are at least three fundamentally different plasma regimes in Saturn: the hot outer magnetosphere, the extended plasma sheet, and the inner plasma torus. At the outer regions of the inner torus some ions have been accelerated to reach energies of the order of 43 keV. Protons are the dominant species outside about 9 Rs, whereas inside, the plasma consists primarily of a corotating comet-like mix of water-derived ions with ~3% N+. Over the A and B rings, an ionosphere -dominated by O2+ and O+ - can be observed. The energies of magnetospheric particles range from hundreds of keV to several MeV. Possible explanations to the observed high-energy population of particles involve the release of magnetic energy which heats the ion component of the plasma and then accelerates electrons to energies of some MeV. In this work we develop a model that calculates the acceleration of charged particles in the Saturn's magnetosphere. We propose that the stochastic electric field associated to the observed magnetic field fluctuations is responsible of such acceleration. A random electric field is derived from the fluctuating magnetic field -via a Monte Carlo simulation- which then is applied to the momentum equation of charged particles seeded in the magnetosphere. Taking different initial conditions, like the source of charged particles and the distribution function of their velocities, we find that particles injected with very low energies (0.103 eV to 558.35 eV) can be strongly accelerated to reach much higher energies (8.79 eV to 9.189 keV) as a result of 200,000 hitting events. The components of the final velocity in the perpendicular direction to the corotation velocity (z-axis) show a bimodal behavior in their distribution. A possible consequence of this acceleration is the radial transport of the particles due to their gain of kinetic energy. It is, when the particle's final energy surpasses the escape energy (in Saturn it ranges from 6.57 eV for protons to 91.33 eV for N+) the particle is able to be radially transported to the outer regions of the magnetosphere.
Durand-Manterola H.
Martinez-Gomez E.
Pérez de Tejada H.
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