期刊论文

Xiao, Fuliang

英文

Nature Communications

2041-1723

2015

6

1

8590

10.1038/ncomms9590

This work was supported by 973 Program 2012CB825603, the National Natural Science Foundation of China grants 41531072, 41274165, 41204114, the Aid Program for Science and Technology Innovative Research Team in Higher Educational Institutions of Hunan Province and the Construct Program of the Key Discipline in Hunan Province. All the Van Allen Probes data are publicly available at https://emfisis.physics.uiowa.edu/ data/index by the EMFISIS suite and at http://www.rbsp-ect.lanl.gov/data_pub/ by the REPT and MagEIS instrument. The OMNI data are obtained from http://omni-web.gsfc.nasa.gov/form/dx1.html. Work at Los Alamos was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy and supported by the Los Alamos LDRD program. We would like to thank G.D. Reeves for making available the data used in this work.

本校为第一且通讯机构

Van Allen radiation belts consist of relativistic electrons trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Trapped electrons often drift azimuthally around Earth and display a butterfly pitch angle distribution of a minimum at 90 degrees further out than geostationary orbit. This is usually attributed to drift shell splitting resulting from day-night asymmetry in Earth's magnetic field. However, direct observation of a butterfly distribution well inside of geostationary orbit and the origin of this phenomenon have not been provided so far. Here we report high-resolution observation that a unusual butterfl...