The Study of Non-Linear Acceleration of Particles during Substorms Using Multi-Scale Simulations

To understand particle acceleration during magnetospheric substorms we must consider the problem on multple scales ranging from the large scale changes in the entire magnetosphere to the microphysics of wave particle interactions. In this paper we present two examples that demonstrate the complexity of substorm particle acceleration and its multi-scale nature. The first substorm provided us with an excellent example of ion acceleration. On March 1, 2008 four THEMIS spacecraft were in a line extending from 8 RE to 23 RE in the magnetotail during a very large substorm during which ions were accelerated to >500 keV. We used a combination of a global magnetohydrodynamic and large scale kinetic simulations to model the ion acceleration and found that the ions gained energy by non-adiabatic trajectories across the substorm electric field in a narrow region extending across the magnetotail between x = -10 RE and x = -15 RE. In this strip called the 'wall region' the ions move rapidly in azimuth and gain 100s of keV. In the second example we studied the acceleration of electrons associated with a pair of dipolarization fronts during a substorm on February 15, 2008. During this substorm three THEMIS spacecraft were grouped in the near-Earth magnetotail (x ∼-10 RE) and observed electron acceleration of >100 keV accompanied by intense plasma waves. We used the MHD simulations and analytic theory to show that adiabatic motion (betatron and Fermi acceleration) was insufficient to account for the electron acceleration and that kinetic processes associated with the plasma waves were important.