Low-Frequency Waves In Space Plasmas

Low-frequency waves in space plasmas have been studied for several decades, and our knowledge gain has been incremental with several paradigm-changing leaps forward. In our solar system, such waves occur in the ionospheres and magnetospheres of planets, and around our Moon. They occur in the solar wind, and more recently, they have been confirmed in the Sun’s atmosphere as well. The goal of wave research is to understand their generation, their propagation, and their interaction with the surrounding plasma.Low-frequency Waves in Space Plasmas presents a concise and authoritative up-to-date look on where wave research stands: What have we learned in the last decade? What are unanswered questions?

While in the past waves in different astrophysical plasmas have been largely treated in separate books, the unique feature of this monograph is that it covers waves in many plasma regions, including:

• Waves in geospace, including ionosphere and magnetosphere
• Waves in planetary magnetospheres
• Waves at the Moon
• Waves in the solar wind
• Waves in the solar atmosphere

Because of the breadth of topics covered, this volume should appeal to a broad community of space scientists and students, and it should also be of interest to astronomers/astrophysicists who are studying space plasmas beyond our Solar System.

Dr. Andreas Keiling is an Associate Research Physicist, at the Space Sciences Laboratory, in the University of California at Berkeley. The overall theme of Dr. Keiling’s research interest is energy and mass transport in the magnetosphere. This has included investigations of ULF waves in the inner and outer magnetosphere, the Alfvénic aurora, the formation of auroral forms and the auroral surge, substorm dynamics, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, the acceleration of electrons by waves, the generation of Pi2 pulsations, and bursty bulk flows and ion beams in the plasma sheet. In addition, he has written two invited, comprehensive review papers on wave-related topics. In his research, he has employed in-situ satellite data, ground-based magnetometer and riometer data, and optical data recorded from space and the ground. He has also used numerical techniques.

Dr. Dong-Hun Lee received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Seoul National University in Korea in 1985 and the University of Minnesota in 1990, respectively. He has been a professor in the School of Space Research at the Kyung Hee University in Korea since 1992, and visiting professors at Dartmouth College and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Dr. Lee has been a member of the American Geophysical Union since 1987. He currently serves as a chair of ULF waves Working Group at the IAGA Division III (Magnetospheric Phenomena). His research interests include wave coupling in inhomogeneous space, MHD and EMIC waves as well as electron waves in the magnetosphere. Dr. Lee served as a reporter reviewer for ULF waves at the IAGA and IUGG meeting in 2005 and 2007, respectively. He has participated in the organization of many international conferences and sessions at IAGA, AGU, WPGM, COSPAR, AOGS, and JpGU in the area of low frequency space plasma waves, which include the last Chapman conference on ULF waves in 2005.

Dr. Valery Nakariakov is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics, at the University of Warwick, in United Kingdom, an Honorary Leading Scientist at the Main Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo, Russia and International Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Korea. His research interests revolve around plasma astrophysics and space physics, waves and oscillations in the solar corona, EUV, X-ray, gamma-ray and microwave observations and theory, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) seismology of the solar corona and mechanisms for solar coronal heating and acceleration of the solar wind, SOHO, SDO and TRACE space missions, ground-based radioheliographs, and magnetohydrodynamic spectroscopy of tokamak plasmas, nonlinear wave theory.