Multi-Scale Explosive Instabilities of the Inner Edge of the Plasma Sheet at Breakups.

Details Multi-Scale Explosive Instabilities of the Inner Edge of the Plasma Sheet at Breakups. Multi-Scale Explosive Instabilities of the Inner Edge of the Plasma Sheet at Breakups.

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufmsm12a0474d&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #SM12A-0474

Physics

2407 Auroral Ionosphere (2704), 2752 Mhd Waves And Instabilities, 2788 Storms And Substorms

Scientific paper

Ground based and in situ observations of plasma processes during auroral breakups indicate that a complex multi-stage instability develops near the inner edge of the plasma sheet. A breakup starts with the near-exponential growth of the equatorward arc intensity that takes several minutes. It is followed by the vortex development which may be accompanied by the explosive growth of magnetic pulsations. Further evolution can be either saturation, as during pseudo-breakups, or interaction with more global plasma sheet processes leading to a full substorm. We compare these dynamics with the nonlinear analysis of the energy evolution associated with a low-beta ballooning instability in the region where the magnetic field line topology becomes stretched out of dipolar. This analysis suggests that the initial exponential growth stage, that can be responsible for the arc intensity growth, ends up with a linear oscillatory stage that we connect to a vortex saturation. However during this stage, the third order nonlinear term can become dominant in the system. This leads to the explosive growth of the perturbations. Depending on the initial topology, this growth can saturate due to the presence of the stabilizing fourth order term or can lead to a global destabilizing of plasma in the region.

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