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In situ observations of multistage electron acceleration driven by magnetic reconnection
Author(s) -
Wu Mingyu,
Huang Can,
Lu Quanming,
Volwerk Martin,
Nakamura Rumi,
Vörös Zoltán,
Zhang Tielong,
Wang Shui
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: space physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9402
pISSN - 2169-9380
DOI - 10.1002/2015ja021165
Subject(s) - magnetic reconnection , physics , electron , acceleration , flux (metallurgy) , adiabatic process , computational physics , particle acceleration , magnetic energy , magnetic field , atomic physics , classical mechanics , nuclear physics , materials science , quantum mechanics , magnetization , metallurgy
With observations of magnetic reconnection and the related bursty bulk flow (BBF) in the magnetotail by Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, we investigate the process of the multistage acceleration of electrons in magnetotail reconnection events, which can be divided into three distinct stages: (1) first, electrons are accelerated in the vicinity of the X line where the electron temperature can be significantly raised while the energetic electron flux with the energy larger than tens of keV has no obvious enhancement. (2) Second, electrons suffer the nonadiabatic acceleration in the pileup region of magnetic reconnection, which results in the obvious enhancement of the energetic electron flux and the small increase of the electron temperature in the earthward flow. (3) At last, the energetic electron flux can be further raised in the BBFs due to adiabatic acceleration mechanisms. Our study indicates that low‐energy electrons can be accelerated to a high energy with a multistage process in magnetic reconnection events, which ranges from the vicinity of the X line to the BBFs.