Recent measurements of auroral electrons and intense Langmuir waves on a high‐altitude sounding rocket show that these waves were produced by dispersive bursts of low‐energy electrons. The sounding rocket was launched northward into the evening auroral zone during a substorm expansion and crossed several discrete auroral arcs having electron energy peaks greater than 25 keV. The large‐amplitude Langmuir waves, which appeared in ∼ 100‐ms bursts and had amplitudes greater than 200 mV/m, were seen only during periods of enhanced low‐energy (0.3–3.0 keV), field‐aligned electron precipitation. The enhanced electron flux displayed a dispersive signature in which the higher‐energy electrons arrived before the lower‐energy electrons. A wave‐particle correlator, a new instrument that performed a direct correlation of the arrival times of electrons with the phase of the high‐frequency wave field, detected electron bunching at the wave frequency during the bursts of intense Langmuir waves. The electron bunching events, which had amplitudes of a few percent, provided a direct identification of the energy (velocity) of the resonant electrons and therefore established the parallel wavelength (∼15 m). The electron bunching events were detected at or near the energy at which a positive slope in the electron distribution function was seen. During a dispersive burst, the phase velocity (or wavelength) of the Langmuir waves changed in response to the changing velocity at which the positive slope occurred. We conclude that the velocity dispersion in the low‐energy, field‐aligned electrons created the unstable electron distribution that was responsible for Langmuir wave growth. The proposed growth mechanism is similar to that suggested for Langmuir wave growth during solar type III radio bursts.
