Ultrafast measurement of field-particle energy transfer during chorus emissions in space

Abstract

Chorus is one of the strongest electromagnetic emissions naturally occurring in space, and can cause hazardous radiations to humans and satellites1-3. Although chorus has attracted extreme interest and been intensively studied for decades4-7, its generation and evolution remain highly debated, due to the complexity of the underlying physics and the limited capacity of previous spacecraft missions7. Chorus has also been believed to be governed by planetary magnetic dipolar fields5,7. Contrary to such conventional expectation, here we report unexpected observations of chorus in the terrestrial neutral sheet where magnetic dipolar effect is absent. Using unprecedentedly high-cadence data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, we present the first, ultrafast measurements of the wave dispersion relation and electron three-dimensional distributions within the waves, showing smoking-gun evidences for chorus-electron interactions and development of electron holes in the wave phase space. We estimate field-particle energy transfer inside the waves and find that the waves were extracting energy from local thermal electrons, in line with the wave positive growth rate derived from instability analysis. Our observations, opening new pathways for resolving long-standing controversies regarding the chorus emissions, are crucial for understanding nonlinear energy transport ubiquitously observed in space and astrophysical environments.