The Acceleration of Outer-Belt Electrons by Localized Electric Fields

Abstract

To explain the populations of the outer-belt energetic electrons, including relativistic electrons, that sporadically appear in the magnetosphere, a mechanism was proposed long ago for the acceleration of those electrons by short-term bursts of the electric field, which appear on the night side during substorm disturbances (Kropotkin, 1996). This mechanism can be substantially specified if the modern concepts of bursty bulk flows in the geomagnetic tail, the occurrence of dipolarization fronts, and the excitation of localized field-aligned-resonant poloidal Alfvén oscillations involving a strong component of the electric field in the dawn-dusk direction are taken into account.