Two members of our Institute, Dr. Ioannis A. Daglis, Adjunct Researcher of IAASARS and Professor of the Department of Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Dr. Stavros Dimitrakoudis, a Postdoctoral Researcher formerly of IAASARS and currently of the University of Alberta, Canada, were part of an international team that has shown for the first time how the puzzling third Van Allen radiation belt is created by a “space tsunami”. The findings, published in Nature Physics, reveal that intense so-called ultra-low frequency (ULF) plasma waves, which are excited on spatial scales comparable with the dimensions of the terrestrial magnetosphere, effectively drive the radial diffusion of the outer radiation belt into interplanetary space and consequently create the previously unexplained feature of the third belt.

More details can be found here.