Coherent Acceleration of Magnetized Ions by Electrostatic Waves with Arbitrary Wavenumbers

This paper studies the coherent acceleration of ions interacting with two electrostatic waves in a uniform magnetic field B0. This is a generalization of an earlier analysis of waves propagating perpendicularly to B0 to include the effect of wavenumbers along B0. The Lie transformation technique is used to develop a perturbation theory describing the ion motion, and results are compared with numerical solutions of the complete equations of motion. Coherent energization occurs when the Doppler-shifted wave frequencies differ by nearly an integer multiple of the ion cyclotron frequency. When the difference in the parallel wavenumbers of the two waves is increased the coherent energization of ions is limited to a small part of the phase space. The energization of ions and its dependence on wave parameters is discussed.