A study of weak anisotropy in electron pressure in the tail current sheet

Details A study of weak anisotropy in electron pressure in the tail current sheet A study of weak anisotropy in electron pressure in the tail current sheet

Mar 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995jgr...100.3573l&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research (ISSN 0148-0227), vol. 100, no. A3, p. 3573-3584

Physics

1

Anisotropy, Current Density, Current Sheets, Electron Pressure, Geomagnetic Tail, Magnetic Field Configurations, Mathematical Models, Curvature, Electron Distribution, Gyrofrequency, Ion Motion, Stability

Scientific paper

We adopt a magnetotail model with stretched field lines where ion motions are generally nonadiabatic and where it is assumed that the pressure anisotropy resides only in the electron pressure tensor. We show that the magnetic field lines with p(perpendicular) greater than p(parallel) are less stretched than the corresponding field lines in the isotropic model. For p(parallel) greater than p(perpendicular), the magnetic field lines become more and more stretched as the anisotropy approaches the marginal firehose limit, p(parallel) = p(perpendicular) + B(exp 2)/mu(sub 0). We also show that the tail current density is highly enhanced at the firehose limit, a situation that might be subject to a microscopic instability. However, we emphasize that the enhancement in the current density is notable only near the center of the tail current sheet (z = 0). Thus it remains unclear whether any microscopic instability can significantly alter the global magnetic field configuration of the tail. By comparing the radius of the field-line curvature at z = 0 with the particle's gyroradius, we suspect that even the conventional adiabatic description of electrons may become questionable very close to the marginal firehose limit.

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