Three-dimensional stability of thin quasi-neutral current sheets

Details Three-dimensional stability of thin quasi-neutral current sheets Three-dimensional stability of thin quasi-neutral current sheets

Dec 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996jgr...10127413p&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 101, Issue A12, p. 27413-27430

Physics

Plasma Physics

93

Magnetospheric Physics: Magnetotail, Magnetospheric Physics: Plasma Waves And Instabilities, Magnetospheric Physics: Plasma Sheet, Space Plasma Physics: Magnetic Reconnection

Scientific paper

In a thin current sheet (ρi0/L<~1, where ρi0 is the ion gyroradius in the lobe field and L is the current sheet half thickness) of the generalized Harris type, the relative ion-electron cross-field drift is comparable to the ion thermal velocity. The three-dimensional stability properties of such a thin current sheet are investigated by means of nonlocal two-fluid theory and two-dimensional and three-dimensional full particle simulations. As was suggested originally by Zhu et al. [1992], the drift kink mode is found to be of critical importance. For the simple case of no initial Bz field the fluid theory demonstrates that the drift kink mode is a non-MHD mode with a polarization structure such that E1y is an antisymmetric function of z while E1z is a symmetric function with E1z(0)≠0. Two-dimensional (y,z) particle simulations indicate that the nonlinear behavior of this mode is dominated by long-wavelength modes with kyL~1 and frequency ωτ~Ωi0, where Ωi0 is the ion gyrofrequency in the lobe field. Three-dimensional particle simulations performed on a massively parallel computer show that while the growth rates for the drift kink mode are reduced by the finite Bz, they can still be appreciable (γ/Ωi0<~0.05-0.10). The kyL~1 drift kink modes are always the first to grow in the simulations; subsequently, tearing-like modes with a dominant kx wave vector also become unstable. Implications of these results for the triggering of substorms are discussed.

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