Nonthermal Electrons at High Mach Number Shocks: Electron Shock Surfing Acceleration

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Abstract
We study the suprathermal electron acceleration mechanism in a perpendicular magnetosonic shock wave in a high Mach number regime by using a particle-in-cell simulation. We find that shock surfing/surfatron acceleration producing suprathermal electrons occurs in the shock transition region, where a series of large-amplitude electrostatic solitary waves (ESWs) are excited by Buneman instability under the interaction between the reflected ions and the incoming electrons. It is shown that the electrons are likely to be trapped by ESWs, and during the trapping phase they can be effectively accelerated by the shock motional/convection electric field. We discuss that suprathermal electrons can be accelerated up to mic2(v0/c), where mic2 is the ion rest mass energy and v0 is the shock upstream flow velocity. Furthermore, some of these suprathermal electrons may be effectively trapped for an infinitely long time when the Alfvén Mach number MA exceeds several tens, and they are accelerated up to the shock potential energy determined by the global shock size.
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