Nonlinear Landau Resonant Interaction Between Kinetic Alfven Waves and Thermal Electrons: Excitation of Time Domain Structures

Phase space holes, double layers and other solitary electric field structures, referred to as time domain structures (TDSs), often occur around dipolarization fronts in the Earth's inner magnetosphere. They are considered to be important because of their role in the dissipation of the injection energy and their potential for significant particle scattering and acceleration. Kinetic Alfven waves are observed to be excited during energetic particle injections, and are typically present in conjunction with TDS observations. Despite the availability of a large number of spacecraft observations, the origin of TDSs and their relation to kinetic Alfven waves remains poorly understood to date. Part of the difficulty arises from the vast scale separations between kinetic Alfven waves and TDSs. Here, we demonstrate that TDSs can be excited by electrons in nonlinear Landau resonance with kinetic Alfven waves. These electrons get trapped by the parallel electric field of kinetic Alfven waves, form localized beam distributions, and subsequently generate TDSs through beam instabilities. A big picture emerges as follows: macroscale dipolarization fronts first transfer the ion flow (kinetic) energy to kinetic Alfven waves at intermediate scale, which further channel the energy to TDSs at the microscale and eventually deposit the energy to the thermal electrons in the form of heating. In this way, the ion flow energy associated with dipolarization fronts is effectively dissipated in a cascade from large to small scales in the inner magnetosphere.