Nonlinear Propagation, Self-Modulation, and Faraday Rotation of Electromagnetic Beams in the Ionosphere

This paper presents an investigation of the nonlinear propagation, self-modulation, and Faraday rotation of an electromagnetic beam with uniform irradiance along the plane wave front in the ionosphere; the direction of propagation has been assumed to be along the geomagnetic field. Two cases, viz., constant electron density and electron-temperature-dependent electron density, have been considered. The investigation incorporates the midlatitude daytime ionospheric model and the data bank on collision processes, collated by Gurevich; computations have been made, corresponding to heights of 90 and 100 km, where the collisional nonlinear effects are significant. Simultaneous solutions of the energy balance of electrons, ions, and neutral species have been achieved to obtain the nonlinear dielectric function; the dielectric function so obtained has been incorporated in the wave equation, whose solution is the basis for the investigation of nonlinear propagation, self-modulation, and Faraday rotation. A discussion of the numerical results thus obtained concludes this paper.