Rewriting 60 Years of Radiation Belt Physics?
Sprinkles in Disguise
For more than sixty years, diffusion has provided one of the central frameworks for describing the transport of energetic particles in the Earth’s radiation belts. In this framework, changes in particle distributions are often interpreted as the result of gradual, stochastic transport, much like a drop of ink dispersing through water. It is a simple, elegant idea, and it has helped anchor the field ever since.
As one of the first scientific results to emerge from the ISSI International Team 640, “Beyond Diffusion: Advancing Earth’s Radiation Belt Models with Nonlinear Dynamics”, led by Miroslav Hanzelka and Oliver Allanson, a new paper asks whether some of what we have interpreted as diffusion might instead be the observational signature of coherent, collision-less dynamics.
