 |
| Titel |
Detection of thin current sheets and associated reconnection in the Earth's turbulent magnetosheath using cluster multi-point measurements |
| VerfasserIn |
Alexandros Chasapis, Alessandro Retino, Fouad Sahraoui, Antonella Greco, Andris Vaivads, David Sundkvist, Patrick Canu |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
|
| Medientyp |
Artikel
|
| Sprache |
Englisch
|
| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250077050
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Zusammenfassung |
| Magnetic reconnection occurs in turbulent plasma within a large number of volume-filling thin current sheets and is one major candidate for energy dissipation of turbulent plasma. Such dissipation results in particle heating and non-thermal particle acceleration.
In situ observations are needed to study the detailed properties of thin current sheets and associated reconnection, in order to determine its importance as a dissipation mechanism at small scales. In particular, multi-point measurements are crucial to unambiguously identify spatial scales (e.g current sheet thickness) and estimate key quantities such as E*J.
Here we present a study of the properties of thin current sheets detected in the Earths magnetosheath downstream of the quasi-parallel shock by using Cluster spacecraft data. The current sheets were detected by the rotation of the magnetic field as computed by four-point measurements.
We study the distribution of current sheets as a function of the magnetic shear angle θ, their duration and the waiting time between consecutive current sheets. We found that high shear (θ > 90 degrees) current sheets show different properties with respect to low shear current sheets (θ < 90 degrees). These high-shear current sheets account for about ∼ 20% of the total and have an average thickness comparable to the ion inertial length. We also compare our four-point detection method with other single-point methods (e.g. Partial Variance of Increments – PVI) and we discuss the results of such comparison. |
|
|
|
|
|
|