Electron thermal effects in standing shear Alfvén waves

Abstract

Recent hybrid MHD-kinetic electron simulations of Field Line Resonances have illustrated that the acceleration of electrons to carry the field aligned current can dissipate a significant amount of wave energy over only half an Alfvén cycle. This was done in the limit of colder electron temperatures, and in the present study we extend this to consider temperatures of up to several hundred eV. It is found that mirror force effects enhance both the parallel electric field needed to support the given current as well as the dissipation associated with the acceleration of the electrons to carry it. The current-voltage (C-V) relation appears consistent with the Knight relation for a portion of the evolution but then saturates with the decline of electrons within the loss cone. Copyright 2008 by the American Geophysical Union.