Motion of Trapped Protons in the Earth's Magnetic Field
Application ID: 19047
This model demonstrates the path of non-relativistic protons within Earth's magnetic field.
Due to the dipole nature of Earth's magnetic field, charged particles, such as electrons and protons, can get trapped in stable configurations within it for long periods of time.
These configurations involve the particles rapidly bouncing from magnetic pole to magnetic pole, and drifting around the earth; this drifting motion is slow in comparison to the bounce motion. This forms belts of trapped radiation.
The magnetic field of the earth is not a perfect dipole and complex fits and empirical models exist to model the field in detail. In order to rapidly compute this magnetic field, an external function is used to encapsulate an implementation of the IGRF (International Geomagnetic Reference Field). This implementation is written in c and compiled into a shared library.
This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products:
however, additional products may be required to completely define and model it. Furthermore, this example may also be defined and modeled using components from the following product combinations:
The combination of COMSOL® products required to model your application depends on several factors and may include boundary conditions, material properties, physics interfaces, and part libraries. Particular functionality may be common to several products. To determine the right combination of products for your modeling needs, review the Tabela de Especificações and make use of a free evaluation license. The COMSOL Sales and Support teams are available for answering any questions you may have regarding this.