Dispersive and dispersionless spatial structures at the inner edge of the plasma sheet simultaneously encountered by 3 Themis spacecraft at geomagnetically quiet time

Details Dispersive and dispersionless spatial structures at the inner edge of the plasma sheet simultaneously encountered by 3 Themis spacecraft at geomagnetically quiet time Dispersive and dispersionless spatial structures at the inner edge of the plasma sheet simultaneously encountered by 3 Themis spacecraft at geomagnetically quiet time

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmsm11a1577j&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SM11A-1577

Physics

2700 Magnetospheric Physics (6939), 2730 Magnetosphere: Inner, 2764 Plasma Sheet

Scientific paper

The inner boundary of the electron plasma sheet at quiet times is known to vary in distance from the Earth as a function of electron energy. Thus a spacecraft inbound through the plasma sheet on the night side observes sharp decreases of electron flux first at high energies and later at lower energies. This dispersed cut-off is explained by an Alfvén layer model in which the separatrix between drift orbits that close around the earth and those that do not depends on particle thermal energy and associated gradient drift. Sometimes a spacecraft observes the cutoff boundary simultaneously at all energies, and this is referred to as a dispersionless boundary. Dispersionless signatures are common at disturbed times and are usually attributed to rapid motion of the boundary. We have surveyed Themis plasma data from 2007 to 2008 in order to identify boundary crossings observed by more than one spacecraft. On Jan. 1, 2008 with the provisional AL index below 20 nT, three Themis spacecraft crossed the inner edge of the plasma sheet within a limited time interval near 1900 UT. Two of the spacecraft observed dispersive boundaries whereas the third observed a dispersionless boundary. The trajectory of the latter spacecraft was at lower latitude than the other two. It seems unlikely that temporal variations could have greatly differed at the three spacecraft, so we attribute the differing observations to three-dimensional spatial structure of the plasma- sheet's inner edge. We will design a model to reproduce the observations. This unusual event requires us to reconsider whether observation of a dispersionless injection necessarily implies dynamics.

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