Perpendicular ion acceleration in whistler turbulence

Whistler turbulence is an important contributor to solar wind turbulence dissipation. This turbulence contains obliquely propagating whistler waves at electron scales, and these waves have electrostatic components perpendicular to the mean magnetic field. In this paper, a full kinetic, two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation shows that whistler turbulence can accelerate ions in the direction perpendicular to the mean magnetic field. When the ions pass through wave-particle resonances region in the phase space during their cyclotron motion, the ions are effectively accelerated in the perpendicular direction. The simulation results suggest that whistler turbulence contributes to the perpendicular heating of ions observed in the solar wind.