Particle acceleration in the magnetosphere and its immediate environment Original Research Article

We review some recent insight into the acceleration of particles in the Earthʹs environment. The most important recent observation is the detection of strong field aligned electric potentials at low and moderate altitudes in the auroral ionosphere that change our understanding of electric field acceleration and radiation both in the magnetosphere as well as in the shock ramp. These electric fields evolve on small scales and amount to a few 10 mV m−1 to hundreds of mV m−1, strong enough if appearing in multitude for acceleration of ions into the keV range.