Relaxation of magnetotail plasmas

Details Relaxation of magnetotail plasmas Relaxation of magnetotail plasmas

May 1987

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1987jgr....92.4735b&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research (ISSN 0148-0227), vol. 92, May 1, 1987, p. 4735-4739.

Physics

8

Geomagnetic Tail, Magnetic Relaxation, Magnetic Storms, Space Plasmas, Variational Principles, Cartesian Coordinates, Entropy, Magnetic Flux

Scientific paper

A quasi-thermodynamic model is presented for the relaxation of magnetotail plasmas during substorms, followed by quiet times. It is proposed that the plasma relaxes to a state of low-potential energy subject to a small number of global constraints. The constraints are exactly preserved by all ideal motions and, approximately, by a wide class of motions of the plasma undergoing magnetic reconnection. A variational principle which minimizes the free energy predicts the relaxed state. Exact, two-dimensional solutions of the relaxed state are obtained. A universal feature of the exact solutions is a chain of magnetic islands along the tail axis. Sufficient conditions for the stability of relaxed states are obtained from the second variation of the free-energy functional.

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