Articles | Volume 28, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-28-2237-2010
© Author(s) 2010. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.Determination of the averaged charge-to-mass ratio of the heavy charged constituents of a magnetoplasma using whistler wave measurements
Abstract. In a cold magnetized plasma with two light ions of comparable gyrofrequencies and any species of heavy ions and/or charged dust particulates, a technique is developed to recover the relative charge density of the heavy plasma population and to estimate its effective averaged charge-to-mass ratio. Such results can be obtained without using mass spectrometer data but only the measurements of the ion plasma frequency, the electron gyro- and plasma frequencies as well as the two highest ion cutoff frequencies.