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Centrifugal acceleration of ions near Mercury
Author(s) -
Delcourt D. C.,
Moore T. E.,
Orsini S.,
Millilo A.,
Sauvaud J.A.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2001gl013829
Subject(s) - mercury (programming language) , ion , physics , plasma , convection , magnetosphere , ionosphere , atomic physics , particle acceleration , geophysics , mechanics , computational physics , nuclear physics , quantum mechanics , computer science , programming language
We investigate the parallel acceleration of ions inside Mercury's magnetosphere. We focus on centrifugal effects associated with the large scale plasma convection. We demonstrate that, because curvature radii of the E × B drift paths are much smaller at Mercury than at Earth, centrifugal effects are enhanced and lead to prominent parallel energization during transport from high to low latitudes. For moderate convection rates, model trajectory calculations reveal that these E × B related centrifugal effects yield energization of heavy ions sputtered from Mercury's surface (e.g., Na + ) of several tens or a few hundreds of eV within minutes. This suggests that, at Mercury, material of planetary origin is rapidly raised up to plasma sheet energies. Such a situation contrasts with that prevailing at Earth where these centrifugal effects are relatively weak, yielding energization of ionosphere originating ions of at most a few tens of eV on the time scale of hours.