Abstract
Abstract. A search of the Annales Geophysicae database shows that double layers and other quasi-static electric potential structures have been invoked hundreds of times since the year 2000 as being the agents of auroral electron acceleration. This is despite the fact that energy transfer by conservative fields has been known for some 200 years to be impossible. Attention is drawn to a long-standing interpretation of the acceleration process in terms of the dynamic fields of electrostatic waves.
Highlights
There can be very few instances in the history of science where a notion, so false as to be inconsistent with the very principles upon which the subject is founded, has survived in the literature for more than 60 years. This is, though, exactly what appears to have happened in magnetospheric physics, where potential differences across electrostatic double layers continue to be invoked as the agents of charged particle acceleration
An electrostatic double layer is a surface covered with dipoles, each having its axis in the direction of the normal to the surface (Joos, 1951)
The seeds of a credible theory for the acceleration of auroral electrons were sown when Landau (1946) predicted that electrostatic waves travelling through a plasma would accelerate electrons whose velocities matched those of the waves
Summary
There can be very few instances in the history of science where a notion, so false as to be inconsistent with the very principles upon which the subject is founded, has survived in the literature for more than 60 years. This is, though, exactly what appears to have happened in magnetospheric physics, where potential differences across electrostatic double layers continue to be invoked as the agents of charged particle acceleration. This process is currently referred to 95 times in Annales Geophysicae alone since the year 2000
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