Publication Date:
2013-09-06
Description:
[1] Inner belt energetic protons are a hindrance to development of space technologies. The emission of EMIC waves from space-borne transmitters has been proposed as a way to solve this problem. The interaction between particles and narrowband emissions has been typically studied using non-linear test particle simulations. We show that this formulation results in a random walk of the inner belt protons in velocity space. In this paper we compute bounce-averaged pitch angle diffusion rates from test particle simulations and compare them to those of quasi-linear theory for quasi-monochromatic EMIC waves interacting with inner belt protons. We find that the quasi-linear solution is not sensitive to the frequency bandwidth for narrow distributions. Bounce-averaged diffusion coefficients from both approaches are in good agreement for all energies and pitch angles. The interaction with inner belt protons, therefore, can be addressed using quasi-linear diffusion codes, which allows faster exploration of parameter space.
Print ISSN:
0094-8276
Electronic ISSN:
1944-8007
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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