Comment on 'do magnetospheric shear Alfvén waves generate sufficient electron energy flux to power the aurora?' by C. E. Watt and R. Rankin

摘要

[1] Watt and Rankin [2010] used a 1-D self-consistent numerical code to investigate whether electron acceleration by shear Alfvén waves in the plasma sheet boundary layer is sufficient to cause auroral brightening in the ionosphere. Their numerical simulation code is based on a series of equations first derived by Thompson and Lysak [1996] in a 2-D geometrical context and adapted to a 1-D (z dependent) geometry. In 2-D, the directions of variation are x and z (parallel to the ambient magnetic field B_0), and the computed magnetic field (the perturbed one) is supposed to be perpendicular to the z axis. Then the perturbed electromagnetic field can be written in terms of the electric potential Φ, and of the parallel component A_(||) of the vector potential.