Stagnant low-energy ions in the near cusp region observed by Cluster

Abstract

Measuring the low-energy ions in the Earth’s magnetotail lobes is difficult, because a spacecraft becomes positively charged in a sunlit and tenuous plasma environment. Recent studies have introduced a new method, making use of the positive electric potential on the Cluster spacecraft, to measure the low-energy ions (less than a few tens of electronvolts) in the polar caps/magnetotail lobes in the years 2001–2010. With the measured velocities, we are able to study the trajectories of these low-energy ions. Particle tracing has been used in previous studies, confirming that ions of ionospheric origin are the dominant contributor to the ion population in the Earth’s magnetotail lobes. In this work, we continue to study the source of low-energy ions measured in the lobes. We found that not all of the low-energy ions in the lobes come directly from the ionosphere. Particle tracing infers that some of the low-energy ions start to move tailward from the cusp/near-cusp region with a zero parallel velocity. In the following, we refer to these low-energy ions as stagnant low-energy ions. On the other hand, the in situ measurements by Cluster show a population of low-energy ions in the cusp/near-cusp region with pitch angles near 90° (i.e., no significant parallel velocity). The locations of stagnant low-energy ions are determined by particle tracing and in situ measurements. Similar ion energies and spatial distributions determined by these two methods confirm the presence of the stagnant low-energy ion population.