EGU23-2963
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2963
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Electron acceleration by intense whistler-mode waves at foreshock transients

Xiaofei Shi1, Anton Artemyev1,2, Vassilis Angelopoulos1, Terry Liu1, and Xiao-Jia Zhang1,3
Xiaofei Shi et al.
  • 1United States of America (sxf1698@g.ucla.edu)
  • 2Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 117997, Russia
  • 3Department of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

The shock wave is a primary interface for plasma heating and charged particle acceleration. In collisionless solar wind plasma, such acceleration is attributed to the wave-particle resonant interactions. This letter focuses on electron acceleration by one of the most widespread high-frequency electromagnetic wave emissions, whistler-mode waves. Using spacecraft observations of the Earth's foreshock transient, we demonstrate that intense whistler-mode waves may resonate nonlinearly with $\sim 10-100$eV solar wind electrons and accelerate them to $\sim 100-500$eV. Accelerated electron population has a butterfly pitch-angle distribution, in agreement with theoretical predictions. The presented evidence of the efficiency of nonlinear resonant acceleration suggests that this mechanism may play an important role in solar wind electron injection into the shock-drift acceleration.

How to cite: Shi, X., Artemyev, A., Angelopoulos, V., Liu, T., and Zhang, X.-J.: Electron acceleration by intense whistler-mode waves at foreshock transients, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-2963, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2963, 2023.