Abstract
Abstract. The paper is devoted to particle acceleration in turbulent current sheet (CS). Our results show that the mechanism of CS particle interaction with electromagnetic turbulence can explain the formation of power law energy distributions. We study the ratio between adiabatic acceleration of particles in electric field in the presence of stationary turbulence and acceleration due to electric field in the case of dynamic turbulence. The correlation between average energy gained by particles and average particle residence time in the vicinity of the neutral sheet is discussed. It is also demonstrated that particle velocity distributions formed by particle-turbulence interaction are similar in essence to the ones observed near the far reconnection region in the Earth's magnetotail.
Highlights
The observation of non-maxwellian particle energy distributions in the Earth’s magnetosphere has a long history (Vasyliunas, 1968; Sarris et al, 1976; Christon et al, 1989)
Different possible mechanisms were proposed such as acceleration near the current sheet (CS) X-line (Hoshino, 2005; Pritchett, 2006; Drake et al, 2006), ion acceleration by electric field due to the growth of tearing instability (Zelenyi et al, 1984; Taktakishvili et al, 1998), quasiadiabatic ion acceleration in the vicinity of the magnetotail neutral sheet by the dawn-dusk electrostatic electric field (Speiser, 1967; Lyons and Speiser, 1982; Ashour-Abdalla et al, 1993, Litvinenko and Somov, 1993; Vainchtein et al, 2005; Zelenyi et al, 2007), particle acceleration by MHD turbulence in the solar corona (Kobak and Ostrowski, 2000; Dmitruk et al, 2004), acceleration due to dipolarization in the Earth’s magnetosphere (Delcourt and Sauvaud, 1994; Delcourt, 2002; Apatenkov et al, 2007; Ono et al, 2009)
In this paper we carried out a numerical study of particle acceleration and transport in turbulent current sheets in three dimensions
Summary
The observation of non-maxwellian particle energy distributions in the Earth’s magnetosphere has a long history (Vasyliunas, 1968; Sarris et al, 1976; Christon et al, 1989). In this paper we suggest another possible mechanism of acceleration which can operate in dynamic regions of CS. This mechanism assumes the presence of turbulent electromagnetic field (TEMF) in the central region of CS (Cattel and Mozer, 1982; Hoshino et al, 1994; Bauer at al., 1995) that can effectively interact with the charged particles and energize them
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