Modeling the Dynamics of Energetic Protons in Earth's Inner Magnetosphere

摘要

Recently, Van Allen Probes data have revealed the interesting energy-dependent dynamics of energetic protons in Earth's inner magnetosphere. To quantify the role of radial diffusion and charge exchange to the observed energy-dependent dynamics of ring current protons, a 1D radial diffusion model with charge exchange loss is implemented. The observed proton flux over the long-term period of November 2012 to September 2013 is first converted to phase space densities, which are then simulated by our model driven by an outer boundary condition at L~* = 5.5 derived from the data. The simulation results show that our model generally captures the transport and acceleration of energetic protons at μ = 30, 50, and 80 MeV/G and K = 0.11 G~(1/2) RE, suggesting that radial diffusion is the dominant source mechanism for >75 keV protons at L~* = 3.5–5.5. In addition, the observed fast decay of protons at lower μ and slow decay at higher μ are well captured by the model, demonstrating the dominant role of charge exchange in explaining the observed energydependent proton decay. For higher μ protons, prompt losses of protons on the time scale of hours are observed over a wide range of L~*, which is too fast to be explained by charge exchange. Some of the prompt losses at high L~* regions are reproduced by the model with outward radial diffusion to the outer boundary. However, many prompt losses observed at lower L~* regions are not captured by the model, which could be due to other loss mechanisms including electromagnetic ion cyclotron wave scattering and field line curvature scattering.