Formation of the storm-time ring current

Abstract

An extensive study of ring current injection and intensification of the storm-time symmetric ring current is conducted with three-dimensional (3-D) test particle trajectory calculations (TPTCs) in this paper. TPTCs reveal more accurately the process of ring current injection. The main results are the following: (1) an intense convection electric field can effectively energize and inject plasma sheet particles into ring current region within 1–3 h. (2) Injection 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 injection and convection electric field, leads the original open trajectories to change into closed ones, thus may play an important role in the formation of the symmetric ring current.