Syllabus
* 1. Inner magnetosphere
* 1.1 Overview of the inner magnetosphere
Individual regions forming the inner magnetosphere. Dipole magnetic field and coordinate systems.
* 1.2. Radiation belts and ring current
History, discovery of radiation belts. Particle drifts in planetary magnetic field, adiabatic invariants, loss cone. Inner and outer radiation belt, South Atlantic Anomaly. Radial diffusion, pitch angle scattering, wave-particle interactions.
* 1.3 Plasmasphere
History, discovery of the plasmasphere. Reasons of its formation, plasmapause, stormtime changes. Means of observation, experimental results and models. Structure and dynamics at smaller scales.
* 1.4 Ionosphere
Photoionization, Chapman production function, impact ionization, recombination. Ionospheric layers, collision frequencies, conductivity and ionospheric currents. Ionosondes, radio occultation methods. Planetary ionospheres.
* 2. Dust and plasma
* 2.1 Dust interaction with elementary particles and plasma
Emissions properties of small objects - overview of dust charging processes. Surface potential of dust grain. Grain formation, clustering, destruction processes. Forces on particles in complex plasmas. Methods of emission observations from dust (particle traps, trapping within plasma). Dust in magnetized complex plasmas (tokamaks).
* 2.2 Complex (dusty) plasmas
Definition of dusty plasmas and dust in the plasma. Waves and instabilities in complex plasmas. Plasma crystals. Survey of experimental observations (e.g., in rf and dc discharges, microgravity experiments).
* 2.3 Dust in space
Dust in space (planetary rings, comets, interplanetary and interstellar dust). Micrometeorites and dust in the upper mesosphere - noctilucent clouds (NLC), polar mesospheric summer/winter echoes (PMSE/PMWE). Survey of spacecraft observations.
Annotation
Structure of the inner magnetosphere and related processes. Dust interaction with elemtary particles – introduction to dusty (or complex) plasmas (impacts and applications).
The course is assigned to postgraduate students and it is held as one-week intensive lectures in academic years
"even/odd," only.