An Improved Theoretical Model for identifying the Drift Kinetic Alfven waves in Observations and quantifying the role of Heavy ions on their properties

Abstract:

Kinetic Alfven waves are associated with various physical mechanisms in the magnetosphere, such as electron trapping and acceleration in the inner magnetosphere, heating of the plasma sheet, bursty bulk flows in the plasma sheet, powering the aurora and acceleration of auroral electrons, and coupling kinetic scale field line resonances. KAWs are also thought to play an important role in facilitating magnetic reconnection and serve as an efficient energy transport mechanism along the field lines. However, multi-point observations enable to determine the density gradient which leads to the generation of drift KAWs (DKAWs). The first observation of DKAWs was reported from Cluster data revealing that the magnetic reconnection is the source of DKAWs near the X-line (Chaston et al., 2005). The identification of DKAWs was made by using the dispersion relation of DKAWs for the electron-ion plasma. However, the existence of heavy ions, density gradient and temperature anisotropy during the same event needs an improved dispersion relation to identify DKAWs in observations from Cluster, MMS, VAPs and THEMIS. We present an improved dispersion relation including heavy ions, density gradient and temperature anisotropy and finite Larmor radius effects, to identify DKAWs in wave observations of current missions and study the effect of heavy ions on the excitation and propagation of DKAWs using the plasma parameters for same event from Cluster mission.