Properties of Relativistic Bouncing Microbursts

Wyatt Wetzel; John Sample; Eric Engel; Mykhaylo Shumko

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arXiv · 2312.03955

Properties of Relativistic Bouncing Microbursts

Wyatt Wetzel·John Sample·Eric Engel·Mykhaylo Shumko

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Abstract

Microbursts are short duration intensifications in precipitating electron flux that are believed to be a significant contributor to electron losses in the magnetosphere. Microbursts have been observed in the form of bouncing electron packets, which offer a unique opportunity to study the properties of microbursts and their importance as a loss process. We present a collection of bouncing microbursts observed by the HILT instrument on SAMPEX from 1994-2004.We analyze the locations of the bouncing microbursts in L and MLT and find they align well with the properties of relativistic microbursts as a whole. We find that that the majority of bouncing microbursts observed by SAMPEX have scale sizes of 30km at the point of observation, or about 1500km when mapped to the equator.The time separation between the peaks of these bouncing microbursts is usually either half a bounce period or a whole bounce period.

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Wyatt Wetzel, John Sample, Eric Engel, Mykhaylo Shumko. 2023-12-06. Properties of Relativistic Bouncing Microbursts. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03955

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