Office:
My research is on heliospheric and astrophysical plasmas. Our research group at LASP has built, or is currently building, electric field and wave instruments on five NASA missions including, FAST (Earth's aurora), THEMIS (Earth's magnetosphere), RBSP (Earth's radiation belts), MMS (magnetic reconnection mission), and MAVEN (Mars atmosphere). We also contribute to STEREO (solar wind) and JUNO (Jupiter's aurora). Theoretical work is on (1) double layers, electron phase-space holes, and other nonlinear plasma structures, associated with particle acceleration (2) magnetic reconnection, (3) wave generation and cosmic radio sources, and (4) solar wind turbulence.
Selected Recent Publications:
R. E. Ergun, D. M. Malaspina, Iver H. Cairns, M. V. Goldman, D. L. Newman, P. A. Robinson, S. Eriksson, J. L. Bougeret, C. Briand, S. D. Bale, C. A. Cattell, P. J. Kellogg, and M. L. Kaiser, Eigenmode Structure in Solar Wind Langmuir Waves, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 051101, 2008.
R. E. Ergun, L. Andersson, J. Tao, V. Angelopoulos, J. Bonnell, J. P. McFadden, D. E. Larson, S. Eriksson, T. Johansson, C. M. Cully, D. N. Newman, M. V. Goldman, A. Roux, O. LeContel, K.-H. Glassmeier, and W. Baumjohann, Observations of Double Layers in Earth's Plasma Sheet, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 155002, 2009.
R. E. Ergun, L. Andersson, L., W. K. Peterson, D. Brain, G. T. Delory, D. L. Mitchell, R. P. Lin, and A. W. Yau, The role of plasma waves in Mars' atmospheric loss, Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L14103, 2006.