PARTICLE SIMULATION OF LANGMUIR TURBULENCE DURING IONOSPHERIC HEATING

Ionospheric heating leads to strong Langmuir turbulence including modulational instability, soliton formation, and spatial collapse. The Zakharov model usually used to describe these effects contains a low‐frequency ion‐acoustic wave equation which cannot be rigorously justified in the ionosphere where the electron and ion temperatures are comparable. In the present work, the low‐frequency physics is described by a many‐ion computer simulation. While some differences are found, the results for the most part confirm the earlier, much less difficult, Zakharov calculations. Copyright 1990 by the American Geophysical Union.