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Particle‐in‐Cell Simulation of Rising‐Tone Magnetosonic Waves
Author(s) -
Sun Jicheng,
Chen Lunjin,
Wang Xueyi,
Boardsen Scott,
Lin Yu,
Xia Zhiyang
Publication year - 2020
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 - 10.1029/2020gl089671
Subject(s) - magnetosphere , physics , computational physics , van allen probes , scattering , electron , low frequency , plasma , atomic physics , van allen radiation belt , nuclear physics , optics , astronomy
Recent observations have reported that magnetosonic waves can exhibit rising‐tone structures in the frequency‐time spectrogram. However, the generation mechanism has not been identified yet. In this paper, we investigate the generation of rising‐tone magnetosonic waves in the terrestrial magnetosphere using 1‐D particle‐in‐cell (PIC) simulations, in which the plasma consists of three components: cool electrons, cool protons and ring distribution protons. We find that the magnetosonic waves excited by the ring distribution protons can form a rising‐tone structure with frequency of the structure ranging from about 0.5Ω lh to nearly Ω lh , where Ω lh is the lower hybrid frequency. It is further demonstrated that the rising frequency of magnetosonic waves can be accounted for by the scattering of ring distribution protons. Moreover, the rising‐tone timescale obtained by PIC simulation is compared with the satellite observation. Our findings provide some new insights to understand the nonlinear evolution of plasma waves in the Earth's magnetosphere.