Warm plasma raytracing of whistler mode waves in the Earth's magnetosphere

摘要

Whistler mode waves play a major role in the energy dynamics of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Previous studies show that inclusion of finite electron and ion temperature can modify the refractive index surface significantly for frequencies near the lower hybrid resonance and hence modify the ray trajectories. In this work we further study the properties of whistler mode waves originating around L = 4, with and without finite temperature effects. According to our ray tracing results inclusion of finite temperature increases the number of magnetospheric reflections. It also confines the wave energy inside the plasmasphere. Agreement of the ray tracing results and the Van Allen Probes observations are also presented.