STEREO observations of large amplitude electrostatic waves at the Earth's bowshock

Details STEREO observations of large amplitude electrostatic waves at the Earth's bowshock STEREO observations of large amplitude electrostatic waves at the Earth's bowshock

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsm13b2061b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SM13B-2061

Physics

Plasma Physics

Magnetosheath, Bow Shock, Plasma Waves And Instabilities, Wave-Particle Interactions, Bernstein Waves, [2728] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosheath, [2772] Magnetospheric Physics / Plasma Waves And Instabilities, [7867] Space Plasma Physics / Wave/Particle Interactions

Scientific paper

The Earth's bowshock as well as interplanetary shocks host a variety of mechanisms that provide for the dissipation of bulk flow energy. Wilson et al., 2007 suggested that wave-particle interactions, in addition to previously suggested particle reflection, may be an important part of the energy dissipation at high mach number shocks. Supporting this idea, two recent papers have identified very large amplitude electrostatic waves upstream of the Earth's bowshock and an interplanetary shock. These waves are expected to contribute significantly to particle scattering and heating. Large amplitude turbulent electrostatic waveforms (up to 40 mV/m), identified as ion acoustic waves, were first observed by Hull et al., 2006 from Polar spacecraft data upstream of the Earth's bowshock during active solar wind conditions. Similar waveforms were observed on Wind by Wilson et al., 2010 (up to 100 mV/m) at a supercritical interplanetary shock and were identified as electron Bernstein waves. These studies were limited to two bowshock crossings and a single interplanetary shock, respectively. We present a preliminary study of a much larger data set of these waves from high time resolution STEREO burst waveform data. Over 200 burst capture electric field waveforms are seen in twelve separate groups on all four Earth swing-by orbits in 2006. They are observed not only at each bowshock crossing, but also within the magnetosheath and at the magnetopause. Wave amplitudes range from ~20 to 200 mV/m. With this dataset we will provide statistical context to the observations of the aforementioned papers and attempt to resolve the discrepancy in wave identification. The results of this study will elucidate the plasma conditions under which these waves are generated and constrain possible generation mechanisms. The ubiquity of these waves, under a variety of solar wind conditions, suggests that they may indeed play an important role in the dissipation of energy at the bowshock.

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