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Fig. 1 | Earth, Planets and Space

Fig. 1

From: L-shell and energy dependence of magnetic mirror point of charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetosphere

Fig. 1

Simulated three-dimensional trajectories of proton of energy 10 MeV and \(L=4\) (i.e., \(x=L-r_\text{L}\)) with equatorial pitch angle a \(\alpha _{\text{eq}}=15^{\circ }\) and b \(50^{\circ }\) in the Earth’s dipolar magnetic field for 60 s. The dipole moment is in the negative z-direction. The black arrow shows the westward motion of the proton due to \(\varvec{{\nabla }}B \times {\varvec{B}}\) drift. The values of \(\lambda _m\) for proton having \(\alpha _{\text{eq}}=15^{\circ }\) and \(\alpha _{\text{eq}}=50^{\circ }\) are \(40.9^{\circ }\) and \(18.6^{\circ }\), respectively. The corresponding energy (\(E_\text{k}\)) as a function of time is shown in c and d. Conservation of energy with time demonstrates the stability of the numerical scheme

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