Effects of Magnetospheric Activity on an Ion Distribution Function Signature of Nonlinear Charged Particle Dynamics.

Physics

Scientific paper

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2744 Magnetotail, 2764 Plasma Sheet, 2794 Instruments And Techniques, 7807 Charged Particle Motion And Acceleration, 7839 Nonlinear Phenomena (4400, 6944)

Scientific paper

Computer simulations of nonlinear charged particle dynamics in magnetotail like magnetic fields have pointed towards the existence of an ion distribution function signature that manifests itself as a series of peaks and valleys. The separation of the peaks has been shown to scale as the fourth root of the normalized energy, where the normalization in turn depends on the parameters that describe the magnetic field structure, i.e. the current sheet half-thickness and the ratio of the magnetic field strength at the mid-plane to the asymptotic magnetic field strength. This signature has been observed during quiet times (Kp<1+) in both the AMPTEE and Geotail Data sets. In this paper, we examine the effects of magnetopsheric activity (as measured by Kp) on the particle signature as measured by the Geotail satellite in the region 20-25 earth radii downtail. We have found that it is evident for Kp < 4- and that as a general rule, the larger the value of Kp, the closer the peaks are together. For larger values of Kp we find that whereas there is some indication of peaks in the ion distributions, the separations do not have the same scaling and are often completely smeared out. We have also used the peaks in the distribution function coupled with magnetic field measurements to determine the current sheet thickness. As would be anticipated, the sheet is thinner for higher levels of magnetospheric activity.

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