| The origin of very high energy (>1MeV) electrons, sometimes called killer electrons in the Earth's inner magnetosphere, (3RE < R < 7R E), following many space storms is of great interest because it elucidates many of the physical processes that occur in space and astrophysical plasmas. The problem is of practical interest because of the damage high energy electrons can cause to many of the spacecraft that operate in the region. Here we examine different aspects of a model by which this phenomena could occur.; WINDMI is a family of physics based models that range in dimensionality from low-order models of dimension d = 8, which model the flow of energy between the eight highest global energy components of the tail, to high order models with d ∼ 1000 or more, for models that resolve the nonlinear dynamics of the system into different latitude zones. The WINDMI models are important because it provides a simple basis for storms and substorms, two important phenomena that contribute to space plasma effects, or space weather.; The models are intrinsically three dimensional in configuration space, and use the basic geometry of the Tsyganenko magnetic field model to define the geometrical quantities. The models satisfy the constraints of the conservation laws of energy and electrical charge in their network of nodes and branches that follow from the structure of the system. They models describe the injection of plasma from the plasma sheet and across the Alfven layer into the inner ring current. Optimal values of the model parameters are found using the genetic algorithm on given storm and substorm databases. The transport uses the storm-time solar wind dynamo electric field as the driver for the network model coupled to the inner magnetospheric corotation electric field.; Previous studies which examined the solar wind as the source of these electrons returned negative results. Under the hypothesis that the plasma sheet electron population is the source of these electrons which are connected to the outer radiation belt region during substorms, we estimate the flux of particles generated at geosynchronous orbit. We use the test particle method of following guiding center electrons as they drift in the electromagnetic fields during substorm dipolarization. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
