SM43A-09
Experimental Evidence for Cerenkov Emission of Whistler Waves by Electron Holes Associated with Magnetic Reconnection

Thursday, 17 December 2015: 15:25
2018 (Moscone West)
Jonathan P Eastwood1, Martin V Goldman2, Xiaojia Zhang3, Heli Hietala4, Vratislav Krupar5, David L Newman2, Vassilis Angelopoulos6 and Giovanni Lapenta7, (1)Imperial College London, London, SW7, United Kingdom, (2)University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)University of California Los Angeles, Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (4)Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, (5)Paris Observatory, Paris, France, (6)University of California Los Angeles, Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (7)Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Abstract:
Whistler waves are a ubiquitous plasma phenomenon, observed in a variety of space and laboratory plasma environments. They play a key role in many important and diverse processes, such as particle acceleration in the radiation belts and auroral acceleration region, the dissipation of plasma turbulence at small scales below the inertial range, collisionless shock physics, and magnetic reconnection. In reconnection they may modify the reconnection rate and also whistler physics is crucial to enabling fast reconnection in the Hall reconnection model.

Consequently, understanding how whistler waves are generated and how they subsequently interact with the plasma is a problem of wide importance and application. It is well known that whistlers can arise as a result of kinetic instabilities, which grow exponentially from noise as a consequence of unstable electron distributions, for example temperature anisotropy. This is used ubiquitously to predict where and when whistler waves are likely to exist and therefore be of importance in many plasma phenomena. Recently it has been demonstrated theoretically and via computer simulations that whistler waves may also arise via Cerenkov emission from electron hole quasi-particles [Goldman et al., PRL, 2014]. Such wave emission can arise even when the temperature anisotropy leads to damping; in this case the system is analogous to a damped forced oscillator.

Here we present novel experimental analysis from THEMIS showing for the first time evidence consistent with the generation of whistlers via Cerenkov emission during magnetotail reconnection. By considering the electromagnetic properties of the electron holes, the amplitude, phase speed and frequency of the associated whistlers, and also the available sub-spin observations of the electron distribution function, we find that the data are best explained by the Cerenkov emission theory rather than by kinetic instabilities due to the electron temperature anisotropy. Whilst the observations presented here were made in a reconnection outflow jet, it is suggested that Cerenkov-emission of whistlers may in fact be a common phenomenon in space and laboratory plasmas.

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