Nonlinear Ballooning Instability in the Near-Earth Magnetotail: Growth, Structure, and Possible Role in Substorms

Details Nonlinear Ballooning Instability in the Near-Earth Magnetotail: Growth, Structure, and Possible Role in Substorms Nonlinear Ballooning Instability in the Near-Earth Magnetotail: Growth, Structure, and Possible Role in Substorms

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agusmsm43c..07z&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #SM43C-07

Physics

2744 Magnetotail, 2752 Mhd Waves And Instabilities (2149, 6050, 7836), 2753 Numerical Modeling, 2764 Plasma Sheet, 2790 Substorms

Scientific paper

To examine the scenario that the onset of a substorm can be triggered by the ballooning instability of the near- Earth magnetotail, we have performed three-dimensional direct MHD simulations of the nonlinear evolution of ideal ballooning instability in two types of analytic Grad-Shafranov equilibria of the magnetotail. The nonlinear growth and spatial structure (in both real and spectral spaces) of the instability are obtained for both classes of equilibria, and its observable consequences are explored. In particular, the linearly unstable ballooning mode is demonstrated to grow exponentially in the early nonlinear phase, and starts to slow down or saturate in the intermediate nonlinear phase. The intermediate nonlinear phase is characterized by the formation of fine scale patterns determined by the dominant ky mode and discontinuous shock-like structures that tend to accumulate at the stagnation point of the sheared flow profile spontaneously generated by the instability. A theoretical framework has been developed to understand the nonlinear growth of the ballooning instability seen in the simulations. It is proposed that, the magnetic reconfiguration in the near-Earth plasma sheet due to the intermediate nonlinear development of the ballooning instability, when coupled to nonideal mechanisms that include reconnection and turbulent transport, may produce current disruption in the near-Earth magnetotail.

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