Thin anisotropic current sheets: Equilibrium theory and simulations of current -driven instabilities

Details Thin anisotropic current sheets: Equilibrium theory and simulations of current -driven instabilities Thin anisotropic current sheets: Equilibrium theory and simulations of current -driven instabilities

Dec 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003agufmsh31a1090s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2003, abstract #SH31A-1090

Physics

2744 Magnetotail, 7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory, 7835 Magnetic Reconnection

Scientific paper

Concentration of the current in thin sheets forms a free energy source for instabilities of the plasma waves, which do not change the initial magnetic topology as they propagate mainly in the current direction. However, these current-driven instabilities may be an effective mechanism of collisionless dissipation and thus promote the reconnection process. Until recently both the linear stability analysis and simulations of current-driven instabilities were limited to the single class of initial equilibria known as Harris current sheets [Harris, 1962]. This limitation did not allow, in particular, the modeling of the sheets with counter-streaming flows of ions, which are typical for the outflow region of the reconnection pattern in the deHoffman-Teller frame (hereafter outflow sheets) [e.g., Yamada et al., 2000; Hsu et al., 2001], and the thin current sheets with two-humped profile of the current density (bifurcated sheets) found in multi-spacecraft observations of the current sheet of Earth's magnetotail [Nakamura et al., 2002; Runov et al., 2003; Sergeev et al., 2003]. Recently the Harris current sheet model was generalized to account for the aforementioned features of the thin current sheets [Sitnov et al., 2003] and then it was included in the massively parallel particle code P3D [Zeiler et al., 2001]. We report the first results of studies of the current-driven instabilities using that modified particle code. We compare in particular the stability picture in thin Harris sheets and similar pictures in the cases of outflow and bifurcated current sheets.

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