Suprathermal Electron Evolution Under the Competition Between Plasmaspheric Plume Hiss Wave Heating and Collisional Cooling

Abstract

AbstractSuprathermal electrons are a major heat source of ionospheric plasma. How the suprathermal electrons evolve during their bounces inside the plasmasphere is a fundamental question for the magnetosphere‐ionosphere coupling. On the basis of Van Allen Probes observations and quasi‐linear simulations, we present here the first quantitative study on the evolution of suprathermal electrons under the competition between Landau heating by whistler mode hiss waves and Coulomb collisional cooling by background plasma inside a plasmaspheric plume. We show that the Landau heating can prevail over the collisional cooling for >50 eV electrons and cause the field‐aligned suprathermal electron fluxes to increase by up to 1 order of magnitude within 1.5 hr. Our results imply that the plasmaspheric plume hiss waves could mediate energy from the ring current electrons to the ionospheric plasma.