Excitation and diagnosis of cascading Langmuir waves in ionospheric plasmas at Gakona, Alaska

Abstract

Ionospheric plasma heating experiments were conducted at Gakona, Alaska to investigate cascading spectra of Langmuir wave turbulence, excited by parametric instabilities diagnosed by Modular UHF Ionospheric Radar (MUIR). This work is aimed at testing the recent theory of Kuo and Lee (2005 J. Geophys. Res. 110 A01309) that addresses how the cascade of Langmuir waves can distribute spatially via the resonant and non-resonant decay processes. The non-resonant cascade proceeds at the location where parametric decay instability (PDI) or oscillating two-stream instability (OTSI) is excited and severely hampered by the frequency mismatch effect. By contrast, the resonant cascade, which takes place at lower matching heights, has to overcome the propagation loss of the Langmuir pump waves in each cascade step. Our experimental results have corroborated these predictions about the generation of cascading Langmuir waves by the HAARP heater.