Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Jul 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003georl..30ssc45s&link_type=abstract
Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 30, Issue 13, pp. SSC 45-1, CiteID 1712, DOI 10.1029/2003GL017218
Physics
Plasma Physics
20
Magnetospheric Physics: Magnetotail, Space Plasma Physics: Kinetic And Mhd Theory, Space Plasma Physics: Magnetic Reconnection
Scientific paper
Recent Geotail and Cluster observations revealed that thin current sheets in the near-Earth tail may have a bifurcated structure. In some cases the electrons are found to dominate the current. We present a generalization of the Harris current sheet equilibrium, which reproduces these features. The model ion distribution contains an additional element, viz. the quasi-adiabatic invariant of the ion motion across the sheet, and assumes ion temperature anisotropy outside the sheet. Bifurcated current sheets appear in the case of small ion anisotropy with T ⊥i > T ∥i (pancake distributions). In the opposite case (cigar distributions) the model describes a single-peaked ion-dominated current sheet embedded in a thicker Harris sheet, which is more relevant to the outflow region of the collisionless reconnection pattern in the deHoffman-Teller frame.
Guzdar Parvez N.
Sitnov Mikhail I.
Swisdak Michael
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