Premium
Oblique nonlinear whistler wave
Author(s) -
Yoon Peter H.,
Pandey Vinay S.,
Lee DongHun
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: space physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9402
pISSN - 2169-9380
DOI - 10.1002/2013ja018993
Subject(s) - whistler , physics , amplitude , oblique case , quantum electrodynamics , perturbation (astronomy) , computational physics , nonlinear system , magnetic field , optics , quantum mechanics , linguistics , philosophy
Motivated by satellite observation of large‐amplitude whistler waves propagating in oblique directions with respect to the ambient magnetic field, a recent letter discusses the physics of large‐amplitude whistler waves and relativistic electron acceleration. One of the conclusions of that letter is that oblique whistler waves will eventually undergo nonlinear steepening regardless of the amplitude. The present paper reexamines this claim and finds that the steepening associated with the density perturbation almost never occurs, unless whistler waves have sufficiently high amplitude and propagate sufficiently close to the resonance cone angle.