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Clarify construction and reproducibility of PADCs reported by Qin & Shalchi (2009)

Determine the specific procedure used to construct pitch-angle diffusion coefficients in Qin and Shalchi (2009) and assess whether those PADCs can be reproduced from mean-squared-displacement behavior in weak composite turbulence.

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Background

The authors compare their PADC calculations in weak composite turbulence against Qin & Shalchi (2009) and find none of their methods produce comparable PADCs. They explicitly note that it is unclear how Qin & Shalchi (2009) constructed the PADCs and that the observed MSD behavior does not allow recovering those specific results, raising a reproducibility question.

References

It is unclear how these authors constructed their PADCs, and the MSD does not seem to behave in such a way that their specific results can be recovered even if the PADC is constructed for each pitch-angle at a different time (also see the next paragraph).

— An Evaluation of Different Numerical Methods to Calculate the Pitch-angle Diffusion Coefficient from Full-orbit Simulations: disentangling a rope of sand (2410.21001 - Berg et al., 28 Oct 2024) in Section 4.2 (Method Comparison in Weak Composite Turbulence)