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Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous throughout the universe: around stars, supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei, binary systems, comets, and planets. Key information is carried by electromagnetic emissions from particles accelerated by high Mach number collisionless shocks. These shocks are intrinsically nonstationary, and the characteristic physical scales responsible for particle acceleration remain unknown. Quantifying these scales is crucial, as it affects the fundamental process of redistributing upstream plasma kinetic energy into other degrees of freedom-particularly electron thermalization. Direct in situ measurements of nonstationary shock dynamics have not been reported. Thus, the model that best describes this process has remained unknown. Here, we present direct evidence demonstrating that the transition to nonstationarity is associated with electron-scale field structures inside the shock ramp.

Shock waves are ubiquitous in space and astrophysics. They transform directed flow energy into thermal energy and accelerate energetic particles. The energy repartition is a multiscale process related to the spatial and temporal structure of the electromagnetic fields within the shock layer. While large scale features of ion heating are known, the electron heating and smaller scale fields remain poorly understood. We determine for the first time the scale of the electron temperature gradient via electron distributions measured in situ by the Cluster spacecraft. Half of the electron heating coincides with a narrow layer several electron inertial lengths (c/ω(pe)) thick. Consequently, the nonlinear steepening is limited by wave dispersion. The dc electric field must also vary over these small scales, strongly influencing the efficiency of shocks as cosmic ray accelerators.

Turbulence in fluids and plasmas is a ubiquitous phenomenon driven by a variety of sources-currents, sheared flows, gradients in density and temperature, and so on. Turbulence involves fluctuations of physical properties on many different scales, which interact nonlinearly to produce self-organized structures in the form of vortices. Vortex motion in fluids and magnetized plasmas is typically governed by nonlinear equations, examples of which include the Navier-Stokes equation, the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima equations and their numerous generalizations. These nonlinear equations admit solutions in the form of different types of vortices that are frequently observed in a variety of contexts: in atmospheres, in oceans and planetary systems, in the heliosphere, in the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere, and in laboratory plasma experiments. Here we report the discovery by the Cluster satellites of a distinct class of vortex motion-short-scale drift-kinetic Alfvén (DKA) vortices-in the Earth's magnetospheric cusp region. As is the case for the larger Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices observed previously, these dynamic structures should provide a channel for transporting plasma particles and energy through the magnetospheric boundary layers.

We discuss a new acceleration or energization mechanism of charged particles in space and astrophysical plasmas. In the presence of an electrostatic potential gradient and a circularly polarized electromagnetic monochromatic wave, particles are accelerated efficiently by keeping cyclotron resonance with the wave due to the electrostatic dragging force. In addition, particles can propagate against the electrostatic potential even if they have smaller parallel energy. This mechanism is potentially widely applicable, in terms of particle acceleration and transport, to various space and astrophysical phenomena, such as shock environment and short-large amplitude magnetic structures. We introduce the basic physical process of the acceleration or energization mechanism theoretically and numerically.