The Stuff We're Doing

Here are the fruits of our labor:

The motion of particles in the magnetosphere can be broken down into three components:

Gyration about the field line
A bounce back and forth along a field line between mirror points
A slow longitudinal drift around the Earth.

We calculated the time scales for these three types of motion and we found that the there are big differencies in the associated time scales. The period of gyration is of the order of seconds, the period of the bounce motion is of the order of minutes while the period of the drift motion is of the order of hours. Click here to find more about this.

Although all particles perform these three types of motion, depending on their history, particle pitch angle distributions, as observed by ESIC, show many differences. We looked at all available pitch angle proton data and we classified all observed distributions according to seven main types of pitch angle distributions. Then we organized this information as a function of the L-parameter (which practically gives us the distance from, the Earth), the Local Time and the energy of the particles. In addition we classified these as results from quiet time and disturbed time periods. To see results, click here