Stability of relativistic surfatron acceleration.

Abstract

In this paper we consider the surfatron acceleration of relativistic charged particles by a strong electrostatic wave propagating in a transverse direction relative to the background magnetic field. We investigate how high-frequency fluctuations of the background magnetic field affect the process of the resonant acceleration. We show that the presence of fluctuations leads to particle escape from the surfatron resonance and illustrate that fluctuations of different components of the magnetic field have quite a distinct effect on the energy gained by particles. In the case of the same power density, the strongest effect corresponds to fluctuations of the component directed along the background magnetic field, while the effect of the component along the wave front is substantially weaker. This is more important for particles with a large velocity component along the background magnetic field. We demonstrate that the dynamics of particles can statistically be described in terms of the adiabatic invariant diffusion. We derive the corresponding diffusion equation and compare solutions of that equation with results obtained by the explicit particle tracing.