The Earth’s outer radiation belt has long received considerable attention mainly because the MeV electron flux in the belt varies often dramatically and at various time scales. It is now widely accepted that the wave-particle interaction is one of the major mechanisms responsible for such flux variations. The wave-particle interaction can accelerate electrons to MeV energies, explaining the observed flux increase events, and can also scatter the electrons’ motion into the loss cone, resulting in atmospheric precipitation and thus contributing to flux dropouts. In this paper, we provide a review of the current state of research on relativistic electron scattering and precipitation due to the interaction with electromagnetic ion cyclotron (EMIC) waves in the inner magnetosphere. The review is intended to cover progress made over the last ~15 years in the theory and simulations of various issues, including quasilinear resonance diffusion, nonlinear interactions, nonresonant interactions, effects of finite normal angle on pitch angle scattering, effects due to rising tone emission, and ways to scatter near-equatorial pitch angle electrons. The review concludes with suggestions of a few promising topics for future research.

Energy spectra of electron microbursts from 170 keV to 340 keV have been measured by the solid-state detectors aboard the low-altitude (680 km) polar-orbiting Korean STSAT-1 (Science and Technology SATellite). These measurements have revealed two important characteristics unique to the microbursts: (1) They are produced by a fast-loss cone-filling process in which the interaction time for pitch-angle scattering is less than 50 ms and (2) The e-folding energy of the perpendicular component is larger than that of the parallel component, and the loss cone is not completely filled by electrons. To understand how wave-particle interactions could generate microbursts, we performed a test particle simulation and investigated how the waves scattered electron pitch angles within the timescale required for microburst precipitation. The application of rising-frequency whistler-mode waves to electrons of different energies moving in a dipole magnetic field showed that chorus magnetic wave fields, rather than electric fields, were the main cause of microburst events, which implied that microbursts could be produced by a quasi-adiabatic process. In addition, the simulation results showed that high-energy electrons could resonate with chorus waves at high magnetic latitudes where the loss cone was larger, which might explain the decreased e-folding energy of precipitated microbursts compared to that of trapped electrons.

It has long been known that the magnetospheric particles can precipitate into the atmosphere of the Earth. In this paper we examine such precipitation of energetic electrons using the data obtained from low-altitude polar orbiting satellite observations. We analyze the precipitating electron flux data for many periods selected from a total of 84 storm events identified for 2001-2012. The analysis includes the dependence of precipitation on the Kp index and the electron energy, for which we use three energies E1 > 30 keV, E2 > 100 keV, E3 > 300 keV. We find that the precipitation is best correlated with Kp after a time delay of < 3 hours. Most importantly, the correlation with Kp is notably tighter for lower energy than for higher energy in the sense that the lower energy precipitation flux increases more rapidly with Kp than does the higher energy precipitation flux. Based on this we suggest that the Kp index reflects excitation of a wave that is responsible for scattering of preferably lower energy electrons. The role of waves of other types should become increasingly important for higher energy, for which we suggest to rely on other indicators than Kp if one can identify such an indicator.