Abstract
Abstract. An extensive study of ring current injection and intensification of the storm-time ring current is conducted with three-dimensional (3-D) test particle trajectory calculations (TPTCs). The TPTCs reveal more accurately the process of ring current injection, with the main results being the following: (1) an intense convection electric field can effectively energize and inject plasma sheet particles into the ring current region within 1–3 h. (2) Injected ions often follow chaotic trajectories in non-adiabatic regions, which may have implications in storm and ring current physics. (3) The shielding electric field, which arises as a consequence of enhanced convection and co-exists with the injection and convection electric field, may cause the original open trajectories of injected ions with higher energy to change into closed ones, thus playing a role in the formation of the symmetric ring current.
Highlights
Most intense magnetic storms are a response of the magnetosphere to the passage of coronal mass ejections from the Sun
(3) The shielding electric field, which arises as a consequence of enhanced convection and co-exists with the injection and convection electric field, may cause the original open trajectories of injected ions with higher energy to change into closed ones, playing a role in the formation of the symmetric ring current
Pu associated with substorm dipolarization of the geomagnetic field and the enhanced convection electric field EC driven by a strong negative z-component of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF)
Summary
L. Xie et al.: Energetic ion injection and formation of the storm-time symmetric ring current trajectories (Wolf, 1995; Xie et al, 2002). While in Eq (1) the total energy of the ring current particles was nearly a factor of two larger than that in Eq (2) (Tsurutani et al, 1997; Chen et al, 1994) These results make scientists believe that the formation of the closed ring current relies on the presence of storm-associated fluctuations in the convection electric field. We propose that the shielding of the inner magnetosphere from the EC may cause a change in an open convection drift path into a closed-loop trajectory, and play an important role in the processes of the storm-time injection and the formation of the symmetric ring current.
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