Nonadiabatic acceleration of plasma sheet ions related to ion cyclotron waves

The nonadiabatic acceleration of plasma sheet ions is important to the understanding of substorm energetic injections and the formation of ring current. Previous studies show that nonadiabatic acceleration of protons by magnetic field dipolarization is hard to occur at X>-10 R_E because the time-scale of dipolarization (several minutes) is much larger than the gyroperiod of protons there (several seconds). In this paper, we present a case of nonadiabatic acceleration of plasma sheet ions observed by Cluster on October 30, 2006 at (X_GSM, Y_GSM)=(−7.7, 4.7) R_E. The nonadiabatic acceleration of ions is caused not by previously reported magnetospheric dipolarization but by the ultra low frequency (ULF) waves during magnetospheric dipolarization. The nonadiabatic acceleration of ions generates a new energy flux structure of ions, which is characterized by the usual energy flux increase of ions (28–80 keV) and a concurrent energy flux decrease of ions in a lower energy range (10 eV–20 keV). These new observations constitute a complete physical picture: The lower energy ions absorb the wave energy, and thus get accelerated to higher energy. We use a nonadiabatic model to interpret the ion energy flux variations. Both analytic and simulation results are in good agreement with the observations. This indicates that the nonadiabatic acceleration associated with ULF waves superposed on dipolarized magnetic field is an effective mechanism for ion energization in the near-Earth plasma sheet. The presented energy flux structures can be used as a proxy to identify the similar dynamic process.