HR: 08:00h
AN: SM41D-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Relativistic Electron Acceleration: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities
AU: * Reeves, G D
EM: reeves@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Lab, Space Science and Applications Mail Stop D-466, Los Alamos, NM 87545 United States
AB: The goals of the Radiation Belt Storm Probe Mission - the second mission in NASA's Living With A Star program - are to understand the acceleration, transport and loss processes in the radiation belts and to quantify and predict their societal consequences. What makes this a challenging and interesting goal is the complex interplay of diverse processes that all operate simultaneously during geomagnetic storms. Theory tells us that both radial transport and wave-particle interactions can act to accelerate relativistic electrons. The two classes of interactions can, in principle, be distinguished by the spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics of the acceleration. However, observational studies have not yet been able to unambiguously determine the precise nature (or even relative importance) of the two types of processes. One reason for the impasse is the limitations of the observations (a limitation RBSP is designed to overcome) but the others are imposed by the nature of geomagnetic storms, during which adiabatic changes and irreversible losses mask and compete with the acceleration processes we wish to understand. In this paper we will review the current state of understanding of radial transport and in situ energization from a theoretical and observational perspective. We will discuss the basis for the ambiguities that currently exist as well as how we can address those ambiguities using currently available observations and newly-developing data assimilation based models. We will also discuss how the combination of theory, models, and the observations promised by the RBSP mission will ultimately provide scientific closure to this important and fascinating problem.
DE: 2720 Energetic particles: trapped
DE: 2730 Magnetosphere: inner
DE: 2774 Radiation belts
DE: 2788 Magnetic storms and substorms (7954)
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005